


Pilgrimage Home

by ImpishFics



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Awkward Mark Lee (NCT), Childhood Friends, Friends to Lovers, Light Angst, M/M, Mark Lee has two moms because he's earned it, Mark Lee thinks too much, Markmin endgame, Mentioned NCT Ensemble, Mutual Pining, Na Jaemin is pansexual, Non-Explicit Sex, Self-Discovery, Slow Burn, Trans Male Character, other hook ups happen but this is a markmin show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:47:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25918309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImpishFics/pseuds/ImpishFics
Summary: The thing about anticipation is that it’s a dangerous thing, yes it creates expectations, but most importantly it creates. Out of dust and wisps of longing and hope and fear it creates beautiful castles with intricate towers and stained glass, and statues in the garden that all can blow over and reform in the wind. It creates.OrMark left for a year, and now he's back.
Relationships: Kim Yerim | Yeri/Na Jaemin, Mark Lee/Na Jaemin, Na Jaemin/Wong Kun Hang | Hendery
Comments: 18
Kudos: 69
Collections: Trans NCT Fic Fest





	1. Part One: Jaemin

**Author's Note:**

> This was Prompts TFF045: transitioning is weird. it’s Impossibly weird. especially when A’s best friend leaves for a year abroad right when they started transitioning, and comes back to see A more confident, happier and more popular (;]) than ever
> 
> Big Huge Colossal thanks to [Milan](https://twitter.com/seungshibari) and [Felix](https://twitter.com/ninchannie) helping beta, and a humongous thank you to [Eli](https://twitter.com/BigBoyEels) for cheering me one and keeping me going, helping the story and being my best friend. All of them have their own experiences of trans existence and helped contribute their own thoughts and feelings to mingle with mine in this story, and i'm so thankful to them for their help and vulnerability. I love them, go read their work. Another huge thank you to the mods of the fest for being so kind and encouraging to use writers as we went along and putting this fest together.
> 
> A preface: I chose to interpret the prompt as Character A's first year of medical transition with T, it could have been socially transitioning and have been just as impactful but I chose to focus on T because, for me, my first year on T was, as the prompter put, "Impossibly weird." I'm sorry to the prompter if this isn't quite what you imagined, at some point I fell in love with these characters and their story became something different to me, I hope you still love it.  
> And my final note dear reader: Jaemin's first year on T is not mine, is not yours, certain things were exaggerated or simplified because the real process of being on T is something so individual and variable, so I hope you can excuse that parts that differ from your own experience. I love you, thank you for letting me write this story.

_“Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again” - Ellen Bass_

Mark Lee is the most fascinating creature Jaemin has ever had the privilege to know, and in some ways he is not unlike a barnacle. Hard shelled, until he outgrows it, stubborn until it is he who breaks through his own skin, emerging a bigger and better thing because of his own insistence, and like a barnacle he clings to a rock, resistant to change, despite the waves that crash against him incessantly, he will not surrender, stuck to his realities with harder, stickier, grosser stuff than most. A barnacle can change drastically, but never because of the waves, never _for_ the waves, sure it may need them to survive but it doesn’t surrender to them. Mark doesn’t change for change’s sake, he wore the same unflattering track pants to school until senior year because he didn’t care that Jaemin and the rest of earth’s population insisted jeans look better. Mark started wearing jeans because he realised he liked the look of a belt, it made him feel powerful, and so Mark’s shedded exoskeleton looked like grey track pants and his new form included black jeans and a black belt with a large silver buckle that he tucked his same old henleys into, only he had changed, by his own volition, emerged bigger and stronger a new version better fit to contend with the elements.

Which is to say he got hotter.

Jaemin is no barnacle. Jaemin doesn’t cling to anything _but_ change. Jaemin’s life has been the anticipation for a series of changes. When will he grow up? When will he start to actually feel like a girl? Will he feel like a woman when he looks like one? When will he feel like a man? When he looks like one? The thing about anticipation is that it’s a dangerous thing, yes it creates expectations, but most importantly it creates. Out of dust and wisps of longing and hope and fear it creates beautiful castles with intricate towers and stained glass, and statues in the garden that all can blow over and reform in the wind. It creates.

At nine Jaemin promises himself that when he has curves and a period and kisses a boy he will feel like a woman, that it will feel like less of a lie, and that creation is dangerous, because it’s so beautiful and so easy that it almost destroys him. Because like fantasizing about running away and being a fisherman, there's a struggle simplified in that, there is toil washed away, exhaustion is wiped away like the sweat that gathers at the back of Jaemin’s thighs in summer, there to no one but Jaemin, but easily erased to make a prettier image. Jaemin gets boobs, Jaemin gets his period, Jaemin kisses the nicest boy in his seventh grade class, Jaemin almost drowns in the lie of it all, because it’s so convincing, but it’s still a lie, and the most convincing ones are the ones with thorns, the ones with teeth.

Jaemin doesn’t drown, Jaemin doesn’t choke, Jaemin doesn’t bleed. Jaemin gives words to the feeling that roils in his gut and in turn the world gives a name to those words. And as a gift, on his fourteenth birthday Jaemin gives that name to himself. Jaemin’s trans, and it’s only the beginning of a new anticipation of change, of new creations, that feel a lot more like promises than lies, but glitter transparent in the sunlight all the same. Tricky are the things made of longing, hope, and fear.

Jaemin’s first shot of testosterone is another gift to himself, happy eighteenth birthday Jaemin Na, things are starting. And then the next day he says goodbye to Mark. Bowling with Mark’s moms, him and Mark lose spectacularly, and then after when Mark drops him off at his house he promises to call, not video call because he doesn’t know how that works, but he’ll call, he’ll try. And then Mark leaves. And then Jaemin starts college. What a hell of an August.

It’s not that his parents aren’t supportive it’s just they didn’t want him to do all of _this_. The binders and short hair were fine but this is too much. The medical stuff. The permanent stuff. Which is to say they didn’t want him to become _this,_ this thing that he is. This thing that he is feels a lot like himself. But they still love him, and his mom still smells like lemons and cloves when she hugs him close to her chest and runs her fingers through his hair. She still smells like lemons and cloves when she kisses his forehead and drops him off at college. And finally Jaemin changes.

Jaemin changes and he changes and he changes.

His anticipation floats through the air like glittering dust motes because Jaemin changes. What he’s always looked like merges with the portrait created in all his anticipation in a beautiful perversion. A twisting of things he’s known and things he’s dreamt and fears he’s kept locked away into something that can’t be thought up, that can only be, and be _so_ alive. He’s so alive, every inch of him is in a joyous dance he could not configure on his own, it is not pretty, it is not handsome, it is not artful, it is beautiful and so gross. It is the rage that fills him so intensely to the top the second he wakes up and leaves him so instantly as he gets up, like the shock of the cool floor chases the emotion away, until it skitters, back where it hides suspended in cottonseed oil. It’s the first hairs sprouting up in patchy pilgrimages on his thigh and up his stomach like paw prints of a creature making a hasty escape to nowhere. It’s waking up from his first ever wet dream and staring at the ceiling, sticky and breathless, disgusting and confused and _exhilarated_. It’s his voice betraying him, strained and cracky on the same notes in the same songs he’s been singing along to since middle school in a way that bleeds progress, bleeds a goodbye to any soulful rendition of “Dancing on My Own” and now this version, cracking and goofy and joyous. It’s the bacne, more painful then he ever realized it could be, sprouting up like mushrooms on a log and vanishing before he can make sense of them, an unexplained visitor, a mysterious party guest. It’s his horrible mustache, thin and patchy, and exciting until it's not thin or patchy or exciting anymore, and shaving it becomes routine, but one that delights anyway. It's the chest hair that grows right over his breasts, a reminder that even when it doesn’t feel like it, when he looks down and he see the ways he’s still the same, he can also see a tangible reminder: he’s changing, and it’s nothing like he expected it to be, it's so much grosser, and it’s so much better. Jaemin’s very being dances. _This_ is what he’s become. Something to celebrate.

Jaemin changes and he changes and he changes. And he celebrates.

He celebrates in his room, when his roommate is out, under the covers because in the first few months he is bursting with want. He celebrates in class, raising his hand again and again even if his voice will crack over half formed answers. He celebrates with others, meeting new people and pulling them into the fray of his joy, of his heartbreak, of his life, dancing with them in twisting circles until they spin away or lock in place.

He has friends who have only ever known him as this, this evolving avalanche of a person.

He celebrates with others in different ways. In the first six weeks of college he kisses more people than he ever did in his eighteen years prior, it’s a lower number than you might think. At parties he gives himself away, sweats and smells and exhausts himself in ways that show every thread of his distortion, every stitch of his creation. He kisses against walls and in bathrooms and on couches and in public and in private and he celebrates, he pauses mid kiss to scream song lyrics reverberating through the walls, and twirl his partner round, and crack more half formed thoughts, ones that are nothing like what he says in class but crack the same, into sweaty, oily, alive, skin.

Because being alive is gross. And Jaemin is so alive.

Sometimes, the dance is more of a riot than a dance at all, something powerful, and angry, and chaotic all the same. Something that speaks of hurt and pain and loss and frustration. Something like getting his period three months after it should have stopped. Something like an ache in his chest and a pain in his back as a reminder that this freedom is partially birthed through restriction, through trapping down his chest, and wearing his restriction longer than he ever should. Something like the briefest moment of fear flashing in his system like lightning when someone knocks on the single stall bathroom. “Someones in here.” Someone’s in here.

But even a riot can be productive, the parts of him that break down, rebuild, and the fires that are lit, rage productively. The flames dance under his skin, roil in his guts, and melt the things that glued him to the past, that kept him from change.

Jaemin loses his virginity the first week of second semester. And he dances. His body isn’t a wonderland, isn’t a temple, isn’t a freak show, it’s something less and something more. It’s just a body, just as weird and gross and fascinating and enchanting as everyone else's, it sweats and gleams in the light, it holds marks and stories and lumps and hair and it holds secrets and shames and glory like any other body. And it’s more than a body, it’s a conversation, a gift, because thats what Jaemin gives, Jaemin gives gifts and sex is a conversation of giving and recieving and Jaemin loves giving. How can he be anything other than a celebration when he can make someone’s legs quiver and shake and sing like a tuning fork just struck, when he can bloom moans and gasps in silent desolate places, when he can make someone so filled up, so sated in the act of being filled. It’s powerful, it’s sexy, it’s raw, it too is a celebration.

Jaemin learns more about himself from his body, his body is learning how to be his body, and Jaemin is learning how to exist in this body. Because it’s not straightforward, but none of the best things in life are.

Jaemin goes home for winter and it’s a mistake. His mother still smells like lemon and clove but it’s no longer enough. Jaemin is changing, and it's hard for that to be anything but painful for his parents, they love him so much, but they no longer know how. He loves them so much, but he’s flying without a map and he can’t give them exact coordinates, he can’t make sense of this for them because he’s still making sense of this for himself. They need space, they don’t say it but it’s something Jaemin knows, for this to work they need to grow apart for a little while and come back together. They don’t kick him out, they don’t cut him off, they still send him money each month and pay each tuition payment on time, but when summer break comes Jaemin doesn’t go home. He applies for a job with the admissions office and he spends his summer greasy with sunscreen and customer service smiles giving tours of the campus to prospective students and helicopter parents.

A mom excuses herself to the bathroom and Jaemin wipes sweat off his forehead and pulls his sticky shirt away from his chest and blows cool breath on his binder, the girl he’s giving a tour to sweats similarly. She looks nervous, glancing at the door her mom disappeared into, like she hopes she may not come back.

“Is there anything you want to ask while she’s out?” She startles and looks around like a bird flapping and fluttering before landing on a branch.

“Is the school very, uh, is it LGBT friendly?” Jaemin wants to hug her, wants to comb her hair with his own too cold fingers, wants to pull her into the fray of this dance. Instead he smiles, something crooked and slanted and joyous and true.

“Yeah. The queer community here is really strong and supportive. It’s like a family.” She smiles something back that's still fluttering and unsure but genuine.

He thinks about her sometimes, she was young, fifteen or sixteen getting an early jump on college tours but he wonders if she’ll come to his school. He hopes that no matter what she goes somewhere she can be authentic, where she doesn’t feel the tether of home. Somewhere she too can change.

Jaemin is still at school when Mark comes home. They did end up talking. Mark was away, writing faster than he could hope to process in a tiny town in the swiss alps for his year long writing workshop and Jaemin was here, but they talked, at least once a week. Jaemin knows all about Mark’s book, it's _long_ and so good. It follows a woman trying to find her little brother who was taken by the government for unknown reasons when she was ten. It’s compelling and heartbreaking and angry. As she works her way through years of government cover ups and meets other people with siblings and children who were taken, she estranges herself from her own friends and family and partners, until she has nothing left but the threads that might lead to her brother. And then she finds him. And the reader is left wondering, was it worth it? Would they do the same thing?

Jaemin was there for every rewrite and draft, as Mark celebrated passing milestones and wanted to pull his hair out thinking he might never see the end. Jaemin saw characters written only to be cut and characters that were inconsequential at the beginning rise to the challenge and emerge significant and memorable. Jaemin saw the plot points shift and shuffle and the main character grow stronger and more vulnerable, saw her brother grow from a memory to a real living person who was nothing like expectations. It seems that Mark too knows that expectations are a dangerous thing.

Jaemin has read every draft, and all 225,546 words of the final draft, which Mark will hastily explain to Jaemin every chance he gets, “Isn’t really a final draft because I’m still going to work on it more before I submit it to any editors.” Jaemin and every professor and author at his program begged him to start submitting it to publishing companies but Mark Lee is stubborn. The barnacle doesn’t care if the wave insists, it will hang on the rock as long as it sees fit.

Jaemin has read about barnacles. Barnacles release millions of larvae into the sea when they want to, sea water is full of it, “a single half mile of shore can leak into the water a million million larvae,” Jaemin had read. Luckily for the world Mark Lee can’t reproduce asexually, Mark doesn’t release eggs but he does give so much. His love and kindness and art is given freely, out into the world when he deems fit, not because the waves ask for it not because the people have demanded it but because Mark feels it’s time to give out. And so he gives it out, love to people deserving or not, kindness to strangers and friends, art that has the power to change the direction of someone's life, and like a barnacle Mark Lee doesn’t care. Most of the larvae don’t become anything, and the ones that do, that survive long enough to hatch and cling to rock and feed in its own right aren’t welcomed into a grand family, aren’t celebrated anymore than the larvae that will never be anything but a white fleck in ocean water, which is to say it isn’t celebrated at all. Mark Lee gives love and doesn’t care if the world doesn’t love him back, Mark Lee gives kindness and doesn’t care if someone’s earned it or not, he gives it because he wants to. Mark Lee makes art that means something to him, and he celebrates his writing the same whether it brings him things, awards, scholarships, cash prizes, or nothing at all.

Mark is stubborn, and resistant to change, and so beautiful, and the anticipation filling Jaemin at seeing him again feels a lot more like dread than something hopeful but constructs cathedrals in his chest all the same.

Mark’s tanner than he thought he’d be. That’s the first thought that lights up Jaemin’s brain like an old timey switchboard when he sees him. The alps are cold, he pictured Mark piled high in sweaters and scarves, and he most likely was for the most part, but he was also on the side of a mountain, closer to the sun than he would be normally, and far closer than Jaemin. He probably wore more sunscreen that Jaemin did, he wonders if it also felt thick and heavy on his skin, or made him break out in the same way. Probably not, Mark’s skin is dry and in the winter it flaked desperately until he finally remembered to smear some lotion on it. His skin probably drank up the sunscreen like a sponge. It looks nice. And tan.

His second thought tangles in a rush with his third and fourth and fiftieth, Mark’s home and he’s here, in Jaemin’s dorm, in his temple to change, wearing his jeans even though it’s still too hot out for them. Jaemin hugs him then, a side hug that Mark makes a real one, Jaemin doesn’t expect it but hugs him back just as tightly. Mark pulls back and looks around the room briefly before settling his eyes back on Jaemin. Moment of truth.

“Welcome back Mark.”

“Woah your voice is different.” Jaemin laughs then, his laugh is different too, but it’s got the same rhythm it’s always had, Mark will see that right? He laughs with him briefly before continuing, “No like it was different through the phone but like, I thought it was because everyone's voice is weird through the phone you know?”

“You think my voice sounds weird?” A teasing smirk, a baiting lilt, but underneath it, maybe farther than Mark can see without his glasses, lies insecurity heavy and thick like mud. Like clay. Because his voice isn't not weird, unsteady in his chest, hopping from foot to foot, resting in his ribcage instead of clinging in his throat or grounded in his belly, floating uncertainty between where it's used to being, and where it can be. It’s deep, but it's not quite thick yet. Watery sometimes. Maybe it is weird.

“No!” discordant and ernest, “No! It’s different but it’s, it’s cool dude.” When Mark smiles at him, Jaemin smiles back. Welcome back Mark Lee. Welcome to the party.

Jaemin doesn’t stop changing for Mark Lee, not that he asked him to, or would ever ask something like that of another person, but still, he can feel his eyes like one of those vest worn during an x-ray, heavy, noticeable, covering something up. Or maybe it’s Jaemin who’s covering something up, he feels torn. Mark is Mark. He’s his barnacle on the rock, predictable, steady, there through it all, his best friend, dorky and goofy and the spot next to him on the couch in his parents’ basement. But his parents threw out the couch, and Jaemin hasn’t been in that basement in over a year. Jaemin’s safety has changed in the last year, and Mark has too, but not in the same ways. Mark is who Mark has always been. Jaemin is who Jaemin has been itching to be. And he looks at Mark, when Mark is looking at him but not his face, and he wonders if he still fits in the spot next to Mark. If that spot is still his.

Jaemin’s friends like Mark, and a taut string inside of Jaemin goes lax, only for new tension to rise. Because his friends only know him as this, and Mark knows where Jaemin has been. Their history is something precious, something treasured close to Jaemin’s heart, close to his core, nestled between his most delicate and fundamental parts, a still beating heart, love letters from sleep away camp, sepia toned days on the playground. It aches him to think that somewhere in the last year, their history has become something dangerous too. He’s not afraid of Mark. He trusts him. He’s isn’t afraid of his past. But still.

Jaemin walks the new tension in him, a tightrope with a long way to fall, but he has to trust that he’ll make it to the end, that the rope will stay secure. He has to trust in himself, and in Mark. And that he’ll survive to the end, or Mark will catch him.

Mark meets his friends in bits and pieces that don’t take long at all because the thing about college is that it doesn’t stop. The days are long and the weeks are short but the days are long enough that Jaemin doesn’t go one not knitted in his friends. Mark has his own friends from freshman year and soon enough their people are dissolving into each other, edges that were never firm abscond into oblivion. Jaemin goes from having friends and Mark and Mark’s friends to having a burgeoning thicket of people to eat lunch with and pull into the fray at parties, more collateral in his avalanche. Mark comes to the party without being dragged because he wouldn’t have been able to be dragged anyay, he chooses to come, he dances and laughs with their friends and when he sits on the counter in the kitchen and talks with Renjun, it isn’t a retreat, it’s his choice. Jaemin doesn’t mind, he dances anyway, past when Mark leaves the floor, past when his hair stops looking good, past when his neck and back river sweat, party glitter of its own. Jaemin doesn’t stop dancing when he falls against Yeri, doesn’t stop dancing when she kisses him. Doesn’t stop dancing to kiss her. Her arms are soft around his neck, and her lips are mouth wateringly sticky where they meet his in a provocative slide that smells like cherry vodka and vanilla lip gloss. Jaemin could swear lip gloss never tasted so good on his own lips as it does when he’s licking it off a stranger.

Her arms are soft and plush until they are firm, pushing him against the wall of the elevator up to her apartment, holding him securely even if she has to tiptoe to kiss him silly against the cool metal walls. They both laugh into each other’s mouth when he spreads his legs in a wider stance to more easily accommodate her height. They don’t stop in her apartment, laughing into flushed skin, giggling in the tangle of limbs and half shedded clothes and soft scarred skin. Yeri is baked in ingrown hairs and striking white stretch marks, glazed in sweat and arousal and she tastes delicious.

Yeri winds him tight and tighter and tighter until his body can’t help but release. And release. And release. Her lips are strawberry kissed and she bites them like a refreshing summer treat when she thrusts into him with a matching strawberry toy, one hand on the mattress next to his head, the other in his mouth watching the way he swallows her. And afterward when he devotes himself to her again and again they laugh, her thighs shake with vibrations around his shoulders, and she quivers gleefully under his tongue, and her joy drips down his lips and chin in giggling drops. He laughs as he shimmies on his pants; he laughs as he dances home in the early morning quiet.

Jaemin doesn’t kiss and tell but the next day when their beleaguered crew gathers in the dining hall to recuperate with sausage and waffles when Renjun asks, “So how was last night with Yeri for you Mr. Na?” Jaemin smiles and looks down where he’s cutting his waffles into bite sized squares.

“We had a lot of fun together Mr. Huang,” His eyes twinkle with mischief as he pops a syrup soaked bite into his mouth Jeno is already rolling his eyes when Jaemin says, “mmmm delicious.” Mark chokes on his OJ, but Donghyuck and Renjun laugh.

“So I guess you’re no longer a virgin then,” Mark says later. He does this alot, picks conversations up that were put down hours ago so Jaemin is sent scrambling finding the string on the ground tracing it back and back until he realizes the source, what he’s talking about.

“Oh Yeri?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah to someone last January. Huh it feels longer ago than that.”

“College is like that.” Jaemin crashes his Arizona into Mark’s, a belated cheers that sends tea surging up onto the tab of the can like water rushing overboard on a ship. Mark cups his lips to slurp it up before it can drip down the side, Jaemin imitates the slurping noise just to get under Mark’s skin. It’s not so tan anymore, slowly losing its color now that it’s no longer nestled on the side of a mountain under the sun, now that he’s not so close to a star.

“A lot can happen in a year.” Mark looks at Jaemin again and it’s a lead vest, it's a weighted blanket, it’s a current pulling Jaemin along. It's heavy, it's a weight on Jaemin, every inch of him inside and out.

Sometimes when people learn about venomous carnivores they are shocked at how they eat something so much larger than them: how the giant water bug can take down frogs twice their size in one bite, how the blue coral snake stays so thin and can take down other more muscular venomous snakes, take down cobras in one bite. The giant water bug has a venom so strong that one prick of it’s incisors can melt and dissolve all the ligaments, muscles, and bones, in a creature in seconds. Leaving behind only the skin filled with everything that once was to slurp the world's most gruesome capri sun. The giant water bug does not respect the pouch. But still, its victims go quietly, in the instant it bites and its venom takes effect, an instant before it dissolves everything that makes a frog a frog it sends their body rigid, paralyzed motionless with a euphoric feeling, and a moment later they stop existing. The blue coral snake doesn’t work quite the same, but similarly, one bite on anything, even a creature deadly to everything around it, even a king cobra, delivers a venom so powerful to the creature that it can become paralyzed faster than any other snake venom in the world. One bite from the blue coral sends every single nerve ending in the prey's body alight. Every nerve in every part of the body all firing at once, all screaming, more alert and alive than it's ever been, and that sends the creature into an utter stillness, completely immoble.

Mark’s eyes on Jaemin sometimes feel like this, so overwhelming, so electrifying, so visceral that he’s rendered immobile. He’s frozen, unable to do anything but let Mark light him up and bear witness. No hiding, no dancing, a moment frozen in time, a breath preserved.

Mark's eyes rake over him, more than a deer in the headlights, a cobra in the maw of a blue coral, alight, alive, in a way he’s never been before. His eyes flick up to Jaemin’s, and Jaemin knows those eyes but that doesn’t mean he understands them.

“A whole lot can happen in a year.”

Jaemin goes to office hours until the TA’s huff, he goes to office hours until other students roll their eyes, until he’s told he’s asked his fair share of questions. Jaemin goes to office hours until he understands. Jaemin isn’t going to major in this but he doesn’t want to scrape by either, he’s done scraping by he wants to understand he wants to really _know_ the material, even if it's above his pay grade. He spends time on Mark’s bed working through the problems, he’s not any help, he would never take a physics class, he took an environmental activism course his freshman year to skirt the gen ed but it’s nice. To sit on someone else's bed and complain, and to be there when Mark can’t remember “that one word, what the one it means like, kinda like allowed but like not wanting to, and it starts with a C?” It doesn’t start with a C, it never does, Mark’s train of thought is a red herring trying to lead him down the wrong path.

“Acquiesced?” Mark will smile and nod.

“Yeah that’s the one!” and Mark will go back to his computer and Jaemin will go back to his problem, the one he still doesn’t understand, but at least now he’ll be smiling.

It turns out, with all that, with TAs and countless hours studying and asking for help and Mark’s bed, it’s still not enough. Jaemin gets a D on the unit test. Jaemin decides humans were just simply not meant to understand rotational kinematics. His physics professor seems to disagree though, so now Jaemin _needs_ to ace the next test.

Mark is, unsurprisingly, no help, but he does know someone though, and that's how Jaemin gets the number of Kunhang, a physics major, who is a friend of Xuxi, who is a friend of Mark’s, but one that Mark already introduced Jaemin to, and one that is dating one of Jaemin’s friend’s and one that beat Jaemin at drunk chess last weekend. That’s not really essential to Kunhang or Jaemin’s physics grade, but it _is_ essential to Jaemin, he wants a rematch. Anyway that’s how Jaemin finds himself ushering Kunhang into his dorm room for the cramming of his life.

Kunhang wears bright orange socks shoved into slides and a pink sweatshirt and a disarming smile and Jaemin likes him already. Kunhang is remarkably patient, and looks over Jaemin’s test in a way that doesn’t feel mean or pitying, and he laughs at Jaemin’s doodles, which makes him feel better. They work for two hours and when they decide to take a break Jaemin spends all of it laughing at Tik Toks leaning against Kunhang’s shoulder until his brain feels less like sludge dripping from his ears and more like a solid thing in his skull capable of a thought or two. It’s good but it’s not enough, Kunhang agrees to come over again in a couple days.

Jaemin studies more and more and things are starting to click, apparently his physics class is calculus based and while Jaemin did pre-calc in high school it’s helpful to have had Kunhang brush him up. When a problem presents itself Jaemin is starting to have the tools to take it apart and understand it. Kunhang has given him a way in and he is very grateful. Kunhang comes over again and he’s no longer wearing slides and a sweatshirt, instead he looks smart in jeans and white crew neck with a big grey cardigan. He looks comfy and soft and he’s patient and goofy. He’s good fun, and after Jaemin aces the practice test Kunhang gives him, Kunhang is _great_ fun.

His mouth is good for more than just explaining problems and cracking jokes, it’s also good for kissing Jaemin’s neck and whispering his name over and over again in a prayer as Jaemin’s mouth does something else it’s good for. Very good for.

Kunhang’s skin is a long buttery glide of grease and soft supple skin. He smells like old spice and sandalwood and a desperation that just under Kunhang smells sour and gritty, salt water eroding away at rocks, seaweed washed up on the beach, boggy marshes simmering in the sun, he smells like life and decay and things that squelch, and the disguise, the pretense, only makes the discovery more delicious. Jaemin nuzzles and licks where his scent is strongest, behind his ear, under thin toned arms, between stiff shaky legs.

He’s not very flexible, they laugh over it, lumber-like legs, Jaemin isn’t very flexible either, but he’s flexible enough. Enough that when he unsheathes the condom from Kunhang’s wallet, and opens it with his teeth, his mouth can stretch to put it on. His hips can stand the strain of settling over him. When it begins, Jaemin’s hands on Kunhang’s chest to steady himself, his thighs can propel himself to span Kunhang’s length. Jaemin’s flexible enough. For this.

Not everything can be as flexible as Jaemin, though, it would seem, they continue: a moaning simmering stream of togetherness, an exhale at the apex of a stretch, the first inhale at the summit. But dams burst, and muscles pull, and Jaemin is an avalanche. Jaemin feels the moment Kunhang finally lets go and he sings praises, it feels amazing, to be filled to the brink until he too can only release. He felt the moment Kunhang gave himself over to ecstasy, felt it sink into him, and he shouldn’t have.

The condom broke. Yikes.

“Shit the condom broke.” Jaemin sits up, he doesn’t feel very much like an avalanche right now. Kunhang sits up too, even though Jaemin can see the way exhaustion blankets his shoulders like a shawl.

“Oh, uh,” he pauses, “I’m clean.”

“I mean that's a relief so am I but that’s not even what I was thinking.” Jaemin runs a hand through his hair, even though it's gross, spreading stickiness like nasty germ. Kunhang tilts his head, like he doesn’t get it, confusion filling his eyes.

“What are you thinking?” And it’s genuine, it's a genuine question with concerned confused eyes, and certain part, the part of himself that Jaemin tries to silence because is doesn’t help anything, is flattered, but every other part of Jaemin is flooded with such intense hysteric disbelief he can’t help but laugh. Loudly and unrestrained, until he has to lean against Kunhang, when he speaks it's between bouts of giggles, not quite from anything feeling very funny.

“Dude, I can get pregnant.”

“Oh!” It hits Kunhang too, and it only makes the threads holding Jaemin together unravel more, until he’s hiccuping with laughter, it feels like all of him is unraveling. “I forgot about that. You can get pregnant?” And Jaemin laughs more but the hysteria fades and it feels hollow Jaemin doesn't answer before Kunhang continues, “We can get plan B.”

“It’s like fifty bucks at Walgreens, more at the pharmacy on campus. I don’t have the budget for that.” and he doesn’t. He could swing it, but it would suck.

“We can split it, and um of course if you can’t cover that now then uh I could” he grimaces, “spot you.” Jaemin doesn’t want to be spotted, he’s about to say something but then something in Kunhang’s eyes shifts. Something sprouts in his mind, a forgotten memory rehydrated, brought back to life maybe. He pulls out his phone, and searches something that makes him make a little “aha” sound before he’s pushing his phone into Jaemin’s hands. “Do you have a Costco membership? It’s like under fifteen bucks there or something, I remember my ex mentioning it.”

“I don’t,” he says, and he doesn’t, “But I know someone who does.”

Jaemin is lucky Mark’s eyes are on the road because he knows that if they weren’t they would be on him, that paralyzing calculating impenetrable stare and honestly, Jaemin has enough to contend with right now. Jaemin chooses one of Mark’s playlists, it fills the car with RnB so Jaemin doesn’t have to think so much about filling the silence.

Kunhang offered to come, and Jaemin considered it, but he would have to skip class to come and Jaemin knew it would be awkward. Awkward with him between Kunhang and his best friend, who might be fifty years old because Jaemin doesn’t know any other twenty year old with a Costco membership. Awkward because Mark has known Jaemin for so long and Kunhang clearly hasn’t. He venmo’d him though, nine dollars and a dancing lady in the memo box. The extra dollar felt heavy, made him feel weird, if it was going to be fifteen he sent more than half. Jaemin felt like he was being tipped. He didn’t like it. He sent one dollar back to him, the memo just said “no thanks.”

Mark stops the car in front of Cotsco, neither of them get out, Jaemin can tell he wants to talk. Jaemin doesn’t really want to talk, but he also doesn’t want to not talk, he wants to not be doing this right now and he wants to not feel weird about this, and yet it all happens anyway. There was no expectation for this, there is no glitter, there is no sand or dust for this, this is not creation, there was no place for this in his mind. But Jaemin loves change, and his body is a thing that exists beyond the realm of expectations, these are the things he tells himself, but they are not always so easy.

“Please don’t lecture me dude.” The ‘dude’ is a diffuser, a lol at the end of a text, it’s something to sooth the exposure of something raw.

“I’m not- I wouldn’t. You think I would do that?” Jaemin shrugs. “I’m not gonna lecture you. I mean the guy should be here.” Jaemin rolls his eyes.

“You introduced me to him, I know you know Kunhang’s name, don’t be so dramatic.” Mark exhales.

“Do you even know if it’s going to work? Like with the hormones?” Jaemin shrugs again, but Mark doesn’t talk. He knows Mark is looking at him but Jaemin doesn’t look back at him, he's being waited out. He closes his eyes and something like shame tugs petulant at his throat and he’s frustrated. Frustrated because this is his body, and he’s not ashamed of it, he talks about it openly, he has sex with this body, and lets Renjun watch his injections, and explains the effects to people in the cafeteria, he’s frustrated because this shame is tracks on the forest floor, the bloody handprints of how he used to feel about himself, how he used ot tear himself down. And he’s better than that. Because this body does such wonderful things, not because of what's changed, not in spite of it. This body is something gross and wonderful, and normally that feels so liberating. But sitting here, in Mark’s car, there's nothing scarier than laying it out before him. How his body has changed, how it hasn’t, to someone who knows where he’s been, where he wanted to go.

If he wants to vanquish shame, he needs to expose it to the light and watch it wilt. Watch it wilt, so he can grow.

“I still could be ovulating. My period has stopped, but sometimes I miss a dose, I just forget I don’t know how but I do, or there's something weird about my prescription too many needles not enough T or vice versa, and then If I miss a couple doses it can come back. So I don’t know. It should work, I got all the elements it needs.” Jaemin tilts his head back against the headrest, and exhales. He undoes his seatbelt, but doesn’t bring his legs to his chest.

“Okay.” Jaemin looks at him, Mark isn’t smiling but his face is soft and his gaze is unknowable, but that too is comforting, “Let’s get some plan B then.”

The pharmacist explains the medicine to him and how it works, it’s a good reminder, the straightforward way she talks calms him a little. She warns Jaemin of what's to come: a period, lighter than normal (whatever that is), and the possible side effects: cramps, dizziness, headaches, nausea and tiredness. Mark is standing a few feet away, a modicum of privacy, but Jaemin knows he’s listening, and he’s glad for it, he’s not sure how much his brain is actually absorbing right now.

“You got that right?” Mark nods, he got it.

Their cart is a case of gatorade, 58 oz of goldfish, and the plan B. The sample lady sees their cart and wordlessly gives them both more green tea Pocky. Maybe this Costco is super progressive, or maybe no one gives a shit, but Jaemin is still a little surprised when no one looks at them weird for being two men buying plan B. It ends up being $13.24 with Mark’s membership, Jaemin doesn’t send Kunhang half of the $1.76.

Instead, he uses it to buy him and Mark a hot dog and large soda for $1.50, because he’s supposed to take the pill with food. Mark cuts the hot dog in half with a food court plastic knife, and Jaemin unboxes the pill. It’s a big box for such a small pill. He thinks about that, about the white empty space around the white pill, about negative space and pages that are intentionally left blank. Mark pushes him half of a hot dog, and both the ketchup packets that came with it. Half his hot dog is gone in two bites, he washes it down with Pepsi and a pill, and finishes the hot dog. Mark is one of those people that cares about Pepsi vs Coke, and he likes Coke more but that doesn’t stop him from drinking more than his fair share of the Pepsi. Jaemin fills it up again before they leave to put the Gatorade and Goldfish in Mark’s car.

He feels off. Just, generally pretty shitty. He still goes to class and he still talks to his friends, he still gets nervous for the exam. The test goes well, he has the tools, he has the opening, he has the whatever but as soon as he turns it in he gets water, he takes a lap, he stretches his legs, his stomach hurts. He doesn’t tell people, he doesn’t make Mark or Kunhang _not_ tell people, but he can’t picture them gossiping really. It’s weird not telling people, when he’s made it his business to celebrate, when he’s gotten in the habit of broadcasting his development, when it’s become something so central to him. This doesn’t feel a part of the dance or the riot, it just feels. It just feels. His stomach hurts. And he’s tired.

Where does he draw the line, when has his body become something to draw lines over. After class he gets dinner to go, soup in a thermal cup, Fritos, roasted vegetables in a small plastic to-go container. He puts on the desk next to his bed and doesn’t cry. He grabs his shower caddy and a towel and goes to the shower and waits for the water to heat up on the bench in the dry part and he doesn’t cry. The shower room is empty, everyone is at dinner or still in class, or even already getting ready to go out and pregame. Jaemin steps into the hot spray and steam and he doesn’t cry. He washes his hair, he showers, he lets the hot water wash over the parts of his back that never seem to stop aching, over his tender lower back, and sensitive chest. He doesn’t shave, even though his face is getting pretty scruffy. He gets out of the shower and wraps himself in one of the towels he brought from home, an indeterminate mess of scribbles from Target, faded now from being used as a beach towel. He bundles his dirty clothes to his chest and grabs his caddy and walks back to his room in squelchy shower flip flops and he doesn't cry.

Jaemin locks the door to his room and dumps his clothes in the hamper. And puts his caddy away. And he stands in front of his mirror, the one from the school that's almost a full length mirror, the one that cuts off his knees and below. And he unwraps his towel. And he stares, and lets his hand chart a path of its own, dragging across his water tight skin with its full weight, through the thick hair between his legs that grows sparser and more uncertain on his stomach. Over the small swell of muscle on his arms from working out, and the soft chub on his stomach. Through his short hair, and the agitated acne on his neck that feathers out spottily on his chest. His chest. He explores his chest too. A tourist in his hometown, he touches his sensitive tender self with delicate reverent hands, as if it’s the first time, with fresh eyes. And finally, Jaemin cries.

He doesn’t stop tracing over what should be a familiar path on his body, he doesn’t despair. This isn’t him breaking down. He brings another hand to grasp at himself, this is his body as it is. Hair on his chest, sensitive rosy nipples, patchy scrapes of hair, something that ovulates. After so many years of creating cathedrals, and dust motes, and expectations, and hopes and fears, why is it that he runs from this too. His body is one that creates, and one that changes.

He pauses. He gets lotion, Lubriderm, it smells like his mom after the shower and sunburns and a calm he has been missing. He works it into his skin methodically, it is no less of an exploration. He rubs at his skin with the balm and watches his hands in the mirror. This is not what he dreamed of. In high school, the google search engine open looking at progress videos, reading ftm posts on Tumblr, scrolling days weeks month back in someones instagram. Imagining, praying, creating a future for himself. He looks at the body in the mirror, and it isn’t the one he wanted. And it is the one he celebrates.

He spreads the cream out, soothing dry patches passing reverently over every aspect of the reality, the way loved ones prepare a body for a funeral. He anoints himself. Creams, and scents, and oils, this body is not the one he promised himself it would be, this reality has not changed in every way he hoped it would. His vision of the future is starved and weakened, and he loves it, and so he prepares it for burial.

Jaemin isn’t ashamed of his past, isn’t sorry to it, he is no longer in denial of it. He loves himself, fourteen and so scared and so hopeful, and so he buries it. And in burying it, he celebrates it, once more in a new way. Thank you. And goodbye.

He looks at his body in the mirror, shiny with hydration and his own efforts. He puts on his binder, he puts on his boxers, he puts on a big soft shirt. He celebrates it, the body in front of him, gross and beautiful and alive. Not the one he was given, not the one he wanted, but the one he loves.

_“If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.” -Terry Tempest Williams_


	2. Part Two: Mark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone who didn’t know Jaemin that well would think not much has changed. But Mark knows Jaemin that well. And now Jaemin looks… He looks like screaming into the gorge at night, hearing their own voices echoed back at them, an exuberant chorus. He looks like their first sip of alcohol, one horrible stolen wine bottle from his mom’s collection, split in a tent in the woods, conversations hushed and pocketed with runaway giggling, cheeks flushed and rosy in the sealed air of their poorly pitched tent. He looks like driving a state away for the good fireworks, the ones they can’t buy in their home state, and setting them off in the soccer field behind the old middle school at night, watching the lights dance in the sky in the minutes before they have to scatter, like the thrill of risking it for something so exhilarating, so lovely, so fleeting, and the raucous laughter that overtakes them in fifty foot waves as they catch their breath two blocks away. He looks, he looks, he looks.  
> Mark can’t take his eyes off him. The problems don’t go away, and maybe Mark is still a coward, but he feels at least a little more prepared to face them.

[Wikipedia Featured Articles  ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles)

The thing is, Mark didn’t _start_ looking at Jaemin, Mark never stopped. Jaemin is the most fascinating thing in any room, he is the LED TV in a restaurant playing baseball that Mark can’t help but watch even if he doesn’t really get baseball. Mark doesn’t always get Jaemin, but he doesn’t stop trying to.

Mark, shamefully, really likes learning. He’s a curious kid, that was what was written on his report cards three years a row 4th-6th grade, “Mark is curious kid, a delight to have in class but not always on topic.” Mark is twenty and he’s still a curious kid. Some things always ring true, that's what Mark likes.

Mark likes things that feel true and don’t stop feeling true, things that ring all the same as things rust and fall away. So many things rust. So many things are left behind. Things stop fitting.

Sometimes he’s misunderstood. Mark’s bad with his words. Jaemin laughs at this, Mark’s moms laugh at this, how can someone so good with words on paper make such a mess with them when they are in his hands, when they are swirling on his tongue. They laugh, but not meanly, not condescending. They laugh the way they always have, his little support system, his corner of the world. Their laughs ring true.

Sometimes people misunderstand Mark, think he means that he doesn’t like things that are weak, or get broken, or adapt to survive time. That’s not it. The bear he was given when his Moms picked him up for the first time at the airport, dirty, missing an ear, with one large poorly stitched patch on its left leg after so many years. Mr. Max rings true.

Some things rust. His middle school wonder for WWE falls away. The joy associated with bike riding rusts with his bike in the garage after watching a 2002 Mazda Protege hit his mom's Diamondback on a Sunday afternoon. His unyielding respect for his grandfather is shelved for memories when he stops coming over. After the things Mark overhears him tell his eomma over the phone.

When things become too much, Mark turns to Wikipedia. He would never cite them in a paper or really do _anything_ with the knowledge he gains there but for someone who likes learning, someone who's still a curious kid, it's a good place to be. Of the over six million articles on Wikipedia, there's a little over five thousand featured articles, ones that have been reviewed and deemed excellent and thorough sources of information. Someday Mark might just read every featured article there is. He's pretty helpful on a trivia team.

[Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ilyich_Tchaikovsky)\- The Wandering Years

Mark is both a coward and not. He never takes back his word, he wouldn’t. The things he promises he sticks to, even when it feels like a weight on his chest, like hands around his neck. He keeps his promises. It’s the things that he doesn’t say, the things he doesn’t do that make him a coward.

When you’re young, adults say ‘think before you speak’ and Mark internalized that. Maybe too much. He thinks and overthinks, until thoughts and feelings and wants get trapped in his legs and stomach and forearms, until he shakes them out or throws them up or gets them down on paper. Paper has been very good to him. He’s not some crazy hipster, he doesn’t only write in Moleskine notebooks, or demand to write only using a typewriter, but he does like to brainstorm using the five-star spiral notebooks he gets during back-to-school sales. But Mark keeps things in, and then he lets them out and it stops mattering at that point because it’s _out_.

The thing about holding everything so tight to his chest, is that beyond everything he might have missed out on, beyond the things he might never have because of it, is that there's only so much space. And if the _everything_ becomes too much he is liable to do something more cowardly than not speaking, he’s liable to try running away.

Tchaikovsky was married for two and a half months to his former student before he fled, overcome with emotional distress and writer's block, he left Saint Petersburg and traveled restlessly through Europe and rural Russia. He wrote letters to people but avoided seeing them in person at all cost. He wrote some of his most important works, and he got out. He ran away from a failed forever, and explored and created and wrote because he couldn’t face everything at home, his class, his homosexuality, his failed love, the woman he left condemmed. Couldn’t face himself.

That's what his workshop was, despite what he told everyone. A ridiculous amount of credits, a beautiful scenery, working with people at the top of their fields, masters of their craft, despite all of that, it was running away. And Mark knows that. He ran away from the change, from the unanswered email in his inbox from his biological father, from actually _talking_ to his moms, from sharing parts of himself. From Jaemin.

Which sounds stupid, because they texted every day and talked at least once a week, but it was. Because if he really wanted to, Mark could have figured out Facetime. Or a Facebook Messenger video call. Or Discord. Or Zoom. If he just sat down and tried for an afternoon, or had one of his friends walk him through it, he could have figured it out. If he wanted to he could have done it, but Mark didn’t want to. When it’s just Jaemin’s words on a screen, or his voice distorted through the phone, it was like he existed only partially, in Mark’s head, a voice echoing alongside his own conscience in his skull.

Mark sat in the lodge, his small old room in a large old castle turned into a workshop site, and he got to pretend, for one year that everything didn’t exist. And he wrote his book. And he thought, and back home things went on anyway.

Tchaikovsky returns to Russia, he sits with the Tsar, he puts on a new orchestra in Saint Petersburg, he returns to the world he left behind. That's the thing about running away, nothing stops.

So Mark comes back.

Jaemin looks different but he rings true. He looks. Mark looks at Jaemin and it’s like looking inside Jaemin, like a view from the inside out. It’s surreal, because maybe Jaemin hasn’t changed all that much, not fundamentally, the building blocks of his best friend remain the same. Someone who didn’t know Jaemin that well would think not much has changed. But Mark knows Jaemin that well. And now Jaemin looks… He looks like screaming into the gorge at night, hearing their own voices echoed back at them, an exuberant chorus. He looks like their first sip of alcohol, one horrible stolen wine bottle from his mom’s collection, split in a tent in the woods, conversations hushed and pocketed with runaway giggling, cheeks flushed and rosy in the sealed air of their poorly pitched tent. He looks like driving a state away for the good fireworks, the ones they can’t buy in their home state, and setting them off in the soccer field behind the old middle school at night, watching the lights dance in the sky in the minutes before they have to scatter, like the thrill of risking it for something so exhilarating, so lovely, so fleeting, and the raucous laughter that overtakes them in fifty foot waves as they catch their breath two blocks away. He looks, he looks, he looks.

Mark can’t take his eyes off him. The problems don’t go away, and maybe Mark is still a coward, but he feels at least a little more prepared to face them.

[Problem of Apollonius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_Apollonius) \- Solution Methods and Recreation

Mark realized something in his freshman year of college, and that was that college changed everything. It was like somehow everything he was at his core got amplified. He kept encountering new things and trying new things and everything that really made up Mark couldn’t help but bubble to the surface. It’s the sort of change that Mark likes, the kind of change that isn’t change at all, but a reveal.

He had a playwriting professor his freshman year who was obsessed with the reveal. She used to say there is no character development in a play, the only way characters really “change” is through magic, or falling in love, any other perceived change is the “reveal” of something at their core, some unseen truth that explains previous actions. Classmates shouted out characters from plays and movies and she rebuffed every single one, characters can change for magic or love “a magic of its own,” and otherwise it isn’t change. People don’t change, distractions in their characters are just peeled back to reveal truth.

Seeing Jaemin for the first time after a year was a reveal that explained not a truth about Jaemin, but one about Mark, one that explained his previous actions.

Apollonius’s problem is the most famous geometry problem. It went like this: three fixed circles on a coordinate plane positioned just so that it seemed almost impossible that someone could create a circle or circles tangent to all three. It was originally posed and solved, but the solution was lost. Only the question remained for a long time, and mathematicians coming after were left with two ways to approach the problem. They could look at it and try to find a solution, create circles tangent in the plane to the three given circles, or they could try to find _the_ solution, the original solution posed by Apollonius and lost to time.

People worked tirelessly, some their whole lives to maybe never successfully recreate the first original solution, others found new solutions, new ways for circles to exist in the space. Time moves on, the world moves forward, and as some still try to find the initial solution, others adapt the problem for the third dimension and find even more solutions to push the problem forward.

The players stay the same, the circles stay fixed on the plane. Jaemin and Mark. But the original solution is lost, Mark doesn’t know how to recreate everything they were before, giggling kids on the playground, days lost to the woods, nights spent playing video games on the couch in Jaemin’s basement until they fell asleep against each other. Does Mark spend the time -their time- trying to recreate that, or can he enter this new space with a different solution. The answer is clear.

Mark is worried about Jaemin. Because Mark thinks too much. It’s just- it’s gotta be a lot to deal with right? The whole Plan B thing? Mark can’t imagine that _not_ being a lot. So he texts Jaemin and Jaemin lets Mark in because he isn’t a coward. Jaemin is so unlike Mark in a million ways, but Jaemin is braver than Mark in a way that feels real. In a way that Mark can’t ever look past or forget. Jaemin lets people in, Jaemin opens up, Jaemin comes out first, Jaemin shares his “journey,” Jaemin has one night stands, and vulnerable conversations with strangers, and he says what’s on his mind.

Mark thinks Jaemin is brave, but he’s bad with words. Out loud. So, he doesn’t know how to say that without sounding condescending, without the suggestion that he shouldn’t be. So Mark doesn't say anything at all. Because he’s a coward.

Jaemin opens the door and he’s wearing his pajamas, a big t-shirt and boxers. He’s still wearing a binder, which makes Mark frown because Mark was there with Jaemin when his first binder came in the mail and he _knows_ Jaemin is not supposed to be wearing it this long. But Jaemin knows that. Obviously. So Mark doesn’t say anything and just hugs Jaemin instead.

He’s been doing that more. Before, Jaemin didn’t really touch people. It was his body, every time it touched someone else it was an imposition of his body on someone else's, it was a reminder of his body to that person and himself and it was too much. That’s what Jaemin told Mark once, Mark’s senior year of high school when they were wasted on their way home from a party, and Mark has never stopped thinking about it. Jaemin used to hold his body stiffer when people hugged him, and he never wrapped his arms around people, sure, he was obnoxious and made kissy faces and pinched cheeks but he didn’t touch people really.

But he does now. Which, yes, Mark _did_ notice that Jaemin sleeps with people now, but that is not what he meant, it’s just that Mark can see Jaemin is more comfortable now. This is the reveal, and Mark may dislike skinship but he could never dislike this. Jaemin is more comfortable, happier, it seems like he no longer thinks of his body as an imposition. Which is good because Mark has always seen it as a blessing.

Jaemin is good at hugs. He is warm and smells like the lotion he uses when Jaemin reminds him and like the word clean embodied. Something? Coconut-y? Maybe uh, lemon? Or pine? Wait scratch that, that makes it sound like Jaemin smells like a car air freshener and he doesn’t he smells like. Jaemin, fresh out of the shower, warm and soft and firm. He smells good.

“How do you feel.” Mark whispers it in the space next to Jaemin’s ear. Jaemin squeezes him tighter and lets him go. He always does that, like a mini goodbye from Jaemin’s arms.

“A little gross. A little drowsy. Weirdly sentimental.” His face looks a little puffy and Mark aches at the idea of Jaemin crying alone in his room. Jaemin doesn’t give Mark time to find the words instead he turns around and hops up onto his bed, posing a question at Mark on the way. “Should we do Mononoke, Kiki or Fantastic Mr. Fox tonight?” The answer should be obvious, Mononoke is, in Mark and Jaemin’s book, of course the best film of all time, but sometimes the objectively best thing doesn’t feel like the _right_ thing.

“Lets do Fantastic Mr. Fox. It’s seasonally appropriate and the kind of low-key I need.” Mark kicks off his Adidas and joins Jaemin on the bed. He’s smiling, the same crooked grin he’s always had, around the same chapped lips he’s always had, on this new bed in this new place. Why would anyone want to recreate the old solution when this is so much better. Even if Mark is still just as scared.

“Excellent choice.”

Watching movies with Jaemin is ritual, it is a repeated practice that still holds meaning each time. Jaemin is tired. Mark is tired but he knows it’s different. They don’t talk during the movie, not because they are against it, Mark’s eomma talks through every movie and neither he nor his mom mind. Sometimes him and Jaemin will talk, quiet chatter, conversations that are born and die in breaks in dialogue, but right now neither of them needs to talk.

Jaemin is bright and loud but he’s also quiet and prone to isolation. And sometimes that isolation can become something far darker, but sometimes it's just the break he needs to recharge. Sometimes, even when Jaemin retreats from the rest of the world, he still lets Mark in. It’s an incredibly precious thing. He lets Mark in, shows off the unfinished edges of himself, sometimes with pride, sometimes with trepidation but he still lets Mark look. Jaemin came out to a stranger before he came out to anyone he knew, it’s something Mark understands, how heavy words feel when they actually start to matter. But he told Mark next, and Mark is always grateful for that. Mark is so grateful for Jaemin’s openness, his bravery, even if it only highlights his own cowardice.

Mark didn’t come out, he kissed a girl at a party and dated a boy his sophomore year of highschool and eventually everyone just sort of assumed. His moms didn’t care, for obvious reasons, which is a privilege, he knows that, but it’s one he was happy to take advantage of. He doesn’t- it’s like. Mark is bad at explaining himself. It’s hard for him to capture his own feelings or understand things about himself without second guessing, so he likes things that ring true, small constants. Dark jeans and a black belt, full metal alchemist brotherhood 2.0, the way Jaemin’s eyebrows move when he watches movies. What he knows he holds onto. He releases writing that are statements, things he lets go and he knows reflect back on him. People assume things based on that and he doesn’t correct them.

Jaemin hates assumptions, he corrects them, gets ahead of them and declares every inch of himself to avoid being misrepresented. Mark likes that about Jaemin, that he shares where he is, but Mark? Sometimes, it’s like he discovers things about himself based on what people assume, things he never thought to think about. It’s like, it’s like. It’s like.

It’s like, he’s fifteen (and Jaemin is fourteen, this is how they measure their years), at one of their friends house for a sleepover deciding what movie to watch and someone suggests a raunchy comedy, and before Mark can even open his mouth Jaemin is saying, “oh Mark gets really bad second hand embarrassment.” He never realized until Jaemin said it but it was instantly true, it makes Mark uncomfortable to watch someone put everything on the line for people who don’t value them.

It’s like Mark is staring at the acceptance letter from the writing program for the fiftieth time, staring at the same words on his laptop, worrying about what it could mean. A year away, stuck with the same people, far far far away from _his_ people, his parents and Jaemin and all the friends he made his first year and his mom comes up behind him, glances at the laptop and says, “you’re going to go aren’t you?” And suddenly he knows, that he will, that he’s been sure this whole time really.

It’s like he’s sitting on one of the many couches around one of the many fireplaces at the old chateau where they were housed for the program smiling at his phone, and Mina, the only other student from their college to go takes one look at him and his dumb smile and says, “You’re talking to Jaemin right?” A string is plucked inside him, something dawns in him that has already dawned in him in a thousand ways and continues to strike him still. Who else would he be talking to? Who else could make him smile? Who could he possibly rather talk to?

You would think he would know himself better for all the things he clings to. Maybe that's what keeps him from seeing. Maybe that's why he spends so much time looking.

Jaemin catches him looking, he’s doing that more than he used to, catching Mark’s eyes and looking back. Jaemin reaches his hand up, up to Mark's hair and all the air catches in Mark’s throat like a thread jamming on his mom’s ancient sewing machine. Jaemin’s hands are the same size of Mark’s own, maybe a little longer but barely, but in his hair it feels far larger, cupping behind his ear. Jaemin leans forward, bringing Mark’s head a little closer and for a second Mark thinks this is it.

It hits him like an airbag in a car crash, how much he wants this, filling him up taking up space inside him pressing against every edge of him until there's no room to breath, how much he wants Jaemin to kiss him. He wants Jaemin to kiss him so badly there's nothing left. Jaemin furrows his expressive brows and just barely puckers his chapped lips and Mark leans a little closer, daring Jaemin to bridge the gap.

Jaemin doesn’t. His eyes aren’t on Mark’s lips or his eyebrows, they are on his own hand in Mark’s hair.

“We should see if they have Tgel at Costco, your dandruff’s back again.” He turns back to the movie. It’s the marital fight in the sewer. Jaemin wasn’t going to kiss Mark. Mark had assumed he would and he was wrong and Mark, for the one-thousandth time, learns something about himself from an assumption. Mark is a fool.

[Conatus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus) \- Medieval Views

Philosophers used “the word ὁρμή ( _hormê_ , translated in Latin by _impetus_ ) to describe the movement of the soul towards an object, and from which a physical act results.” The idea of Conatus is nearly obsolete now. It's been split apart to describe many many different things, inertia, gravity, the origin of god and evolution, neurology, biological systems and about a hundred other things. Mark doesn’t really like philosophy but he respects it, at least early philosophy, not as some noble act of compassion, but the pure uninhibited desperation they had to make some sense of the world around them. Mark gets that, he gets desperation and confusion and the way that bears down on the soul.

Conatus is motion, and it is change and it is movement. It is one of his favorite wikipedia pages to visit, because each time he visits it it makes a little bit more sense and isn’t that conatus itself? That Mark’s understanding keeps going? Keeps growing? Even as he doesn’t actively think about it, his understanding of the concept marinates in his mind and grows, it's like the concept of “sleeping on it” but somehow _more._ But the point is that things keep going and things keep growing even without attention.

Things just get more and more and more and there might be no end. Thats how Mark ends up at Mina’s door, for the first time since getting back from the program.

“It’s open.” Of course it is, Mark can’t imagine Mina locking a door. He pushes it open and she’s there, on her and her roommate's bed that they’ve pushed together to make one mega bed. She’s sitting there, her newly shorter hair half up and her glasses on, wearing a sweatshirt with their college’s name on it and some soft sweatpants and she doesn’t look up from her computer at first, finishing whatever sentence she’s reading.

“Hey.” She looks up and squints at him and a smile grows on her face.

“Oh, Markly!” She always calls him that, some joke about the way he introduced himself on the first day of the program, “To what do I owe the pleasure?” She slides the computer off her lap and Mark takes another uncertain step towards her. They aren’t normal friends.

Mark doesn’t invite Mina out with his friends and she doesn’t invite him to drink wine and dance to Flo Milli in her dorm room like she does with the rest of her friends, but they are friends. They were homebase for each other during the program, someone who was familiar and someone to be honest to. Mark knew about her on again off again relationship with Somi that seemed a little toxic but only because of all the outside influences. He knew about her book, and her family, and her roommate. She knew about his moms and his book and all his friends. They ate lunch together sometimes, going off campus in her car and eating at the Palestinian restaurant that was both of their favorites, but not really hanging out with other people. To what does she owe the pleasure?

“I think I have a crush on Jaemin.” Mina smiles and it’s teasing,

“You and the rest of the campus population, what's really up?” She says with a laugh and it's a brick to Mark’s temple. Or maybe something slightly less dramatic.

“Really?” Mark asks and she immediately catches on the stupid broken desperate parts of it.

“Oh Mark,” she scoots over and Mark immediately gets the message. He slips off his shoes and joins her on the bed, “really?”

“Yeah.” He feels so stupid, “Really really.” He slouches, saying it out loud is a relief but also it’s just so heavy, and it’s been weighing on him so long. She pulls his head onto her thighs to run her small hands through his hair.

Aquinas, who Mark first remembers reading primarily to make fun of the insane repetitive way philosophers used to write, used Conatus to theorize about what we now call gravity(among other things) before Newton and his apple. Aquinas and his friends looked at the observed nature of objects to rise and fall seemingly without an outside force, and they called it “Amor Naturalis” or, in English, “Natural Love.”

Mark wonders if this is where the expression “Fall in Love” comes from, if he can blame an old white guy for this crushing consuming feeling. But, Mark doesn’t really care about etymology enough to google it.

Mina is smart enough to know that ‘crush’ doesn’t quite cover it, but she’s silent as she combs through Mark’s hair.

“Does everyone really have a crush on Jaemin?” Her hand stills and picks up again.

“Well, obviously not everyone, that’s an exaggeration. I don’t have a crush on him, and a lot of people don’t and I’m sure there's some transphobic assholes who don’t feel like that about him. But yeah, I think there's a lot of people who like him.” She brushes her hands through his hair and something about it is soothing, reminding him vaguely of his mom. “I didn’t really believe you when you talked about him, bragging about your best friend but there's something about him. He’s almost magnetic you know? Can you blame them?”

Jaemin is magnetic, and maybe Mark missed his chance because Mark has known Jaemin for too long to be surprised by this. And, it’s not that he’s surprised by this, it’s not that he didn’t always know that he felt something _more_ for Jaemin. But it’s Conatus, it’s movement, it’s growth. The feeling only grows and grows and now he’s here, and he won’t ignore it anymore. His soul has always moved in one direction, towards Jaemin.

“Not at all. How could they not?” Mark says, hoarse, but not as devastated as he expected. Because even before he admitted just how he feels about Jaemin, he always loved Jaemin, he has always been one of the most important people in his life. And Jaemin is so lovable.

“You can talk about it, I know you want to.” Oh lord does he.

“He’s more than magnetic! He’s like the fucking magnetic poles of the earth that all magnets respond to! He makes people feel like things aren’t that heavy without taking away meaning? If that makes any sense? It’s like he frees up all this space for everyone around him to let go and be themselves and silly and joyful without making it feel like anything matters less?” Mina laughs with Mark and Mark keeps going. “It’s like, you can talk to him about serious shit, and he cares, you know? But he’ll take you seriously without making you feel damaged or broken or whatever, and when you laugh with him about something it’s not like you are ignoring the world’s issues. He’s giving you space to breathe, it’s not escapism. When you are with him it isn’t some break, you aren’t pretending the rest of the world isn’t happening, it’s like the rest of the world is happening but it’s okay because you’re here now, you’ve made it this far, and he knows you can keep going.”

Conatus also has another element, it has a hundred elements. It’s vague and has been redefined and redefined throughout history, but another element that always draws Mark in is the tendency for things to get better. Things add more than they fall away. It’s maybe not true, it’s like the MLK quote about the arc of the moral universe curving towards justice, maybe it over simplifies things, and puts a far too positive view on history and can be misused to lead people toward complacency, but lord don’t you just want to believe it? To believe that things are going to get better, to forget pragmatism and cynicism and Nietzsche and have some hope? That things are going to get better because of the way things naturally go? That the future may not be bright but it’s going to get better, that it’s going to be at least brighter than right now, that the peak is yet to come?

“Is that it?” Mina asks, and Mark laughs and feels like he could cry. There is no ‘it’ with Jaemin, because everything Mark feels towards him just keeps growing. Endlessly.

“He just gets more. He becomes more and more of himself each time I see him, and the more Jaemin he becomes the more I can’t look away, the more I can’t take a step back because he’s just. He’s him, he’s more Jaemin and that makes him better each moment.”

“That was so gay.” Mark laughs, in a way that’s a little hopeless and she doesn’t laugh at him. She keeps soothing her hands through his hair. “Your dandruff is back,” she says after a moment.

“I know,” and it’s a response to both statements. Her hand moves down to his neck instead, scratching at his nape and for a moment, a short instant really, Mark desperately misses his mom, and his eomma too of course, but mostly his mom, because she used to do this. When he was little and he had nightmares his mom would let him lay his head in her lap on the couch and comb her fingers through his hair and scratch his back as she watched television at a low volume. He has lots of memories of her like that, awake, quietly watching TV as his eomma slept, a “horrible insomniac” his eomma used to call her. Late at night she would be awake and she would scratch down his back until he fell asleep and she would carry him to bed with hidden strength she magically always had. For a brief moment Mark longs for that, his mom’s face, twelve years younger bathed in the blue light from the TV gently soothing him to sleep without words, even as sleep eluded her. He’s seen her do it for his eomma too, sit in the bed with her and read a book so she doesn’t have to go to bed alone, only to slip off after a bit to spend her hours alone.

“I wish I knew Jaemin better, so I could tell you I thought he liked you too or that he just saw you as a friend. But I don’t really know him like that.” Mina is more realistic than Mark, she’ll always have that over him.

“That's okay.” and he means it, he’s happy just to say it outloud to someone.

“But that’s why you came to me right? Because I don’t know? You have plenty of other friends who know both of you and who know Jaemin so much better than me and could tell you what they think. You came to me because you are scared to know right?”

Mark rolls over, pressing more weight into her thighs, and narrows his eyes at her. “Stop making me feel seen.”

Mina laughs, the kind of laugh where she covers her mouth with her hand and her eyes turn to happy crescents, “Sorry! Sorry! No more psycho-analysis I promise!” She catches her breath before asking, “You wanna get feta fries?”

“Now that, I can get into.”

Jaemin pieces through his leftovers later, “You didn’t get Tzatziki sauce?”

Mark frowns,“For fries? For falafel sure, but fries?”

“It’s good!” Jaemin insists, as he bites into a garlicky, feta-y, wedge-cut morsel.

Jaemin is sitting on Mark’s bed, getting crumbs everywhere, as he works through a physics review packet Kunhang gave him. It’s amazing to Mark that Jaemin still gets tutored by Kunhang after everything but Jaemin just shrugs.

“I mean, we don’t really hook up anymore, and where else am I going to find someone willing to tutor me in exchange for snacks? Plus, I got a B+ on the last test and I get the new material even more!” Mark smiles because Jaemin’s enthusiasm is infectious and he just looks so cute. Sitting cozy on Mark’s bed, calculator, packet, and notebook spread out around him, lips pursed in concentration. Mark must be really gone on him if he thinks Jaemin wiping his hands on his sweatpants is endearing.

“I’m not judging you.” Mark must have said that too late, because Jaemin glances up from his packet and squints at Mark before beaming. Mark gets lost in his thoughts but Jaemin doesn’t disparage him for it.

“I know you aren’t.” Mark spins his swivel chair around to face his computer again, because if he doesn’t he might spend all night doing something dumb, like staring at the line of Jaemin’s neck, or the tilt of his head when he’s focusing.

Mark makes himself focus on his computer, he has an outline of an essay due in two days. He hasn’t started the actual essay yet, he just keeps adding to his outline. It’s seriously beefy, but it feels too intimidating to start writing for some reason. He needs the pressure of the deadline to actually start figuratively putting pen to paper. He could start it right now, just start tying a body paragraph and save the scariest parts, like the intro, for later. Instead he adds another bullet point to his outline.

Something buzzes and Mark just assumes it’s Kunhang answering one of the many questions Jaemin texts him. Mark starts putting his cited texts in APA to further put off starting. Something else buzzes again. And again.

“Are you like, gonna get that?” Jaemin asks from the bed. Mark turns around and looks at him and then he realizes the buzzing is from his own phone on the pillow.

“Oh!” Jaemin laughs at him as Mark snatches it up. He has three unread texts from his eomma.

“Ooooh Mark, so popular!” Jaemin teases and Mark snorts,

“It’s my eomma.” He slides open his phone to see the texts, _Your Mom is picking which cabin to rent for the holidays, tell her to get the one with the jacuzzi and you’ll be my favorite son._ Mark snorts again and looks at the two links of cabins she sent before he texts back, _they both look nice tho?_

“Oh Auntie Hyo? Tell her I say hi!”

_also I’m your only son._

_also Jaemin says hi_

Eomma’s response is immediate, _Jaeminnie is my new favorite son._ Mark chuckles and laughs more when Jaemin cackles when Mark shows him the response. Mark can’t tell if he’s laughing more at his eomma or Jaemin.

“What are your plans for the break?” Mark asks, after the moment has come and gone, after they’ve both returned to their work. If Jaemin is surprised by this, he doesn’t act like it, he just sighs dramatically and slouches against the wall.

“Well I was _going_ to hang out with Renjun in the international student’s dorm,” This is accompanied by an even greater sigh, “but instead he’s decided to _abandon_ me and go home with Donghyuck instead.”

“Are they like, a thing?” Mark asks before he can think of it. Jaemin narrows his eyes at Mark, like he can’t decide if he’s stupid or just dumb. “What?! It’s an honest question!” Jaemin laughs, and Mark wonders if Jaemin decided he was dumb after all.

“Mark, Donghyuck’s has been all but engaged to Xuxi since first semester.” Mark’s train of thought crashes to a halt in its tracks, it’s devastating, there are casualties. In his head.

“What?! But I introduced you to Xuxi this year!” Jaemin laughs harder.

“Yeah!! Before I just called him Donghyuck’s lover!” Jaemin laughs harder at Mark’s face, he figures he must be making that dumb shocked on that Jaemin is always teasing him for, has always teased him for. “Your face, oh my god.” Mark’s face oh my god. Mark can’t help but laugh too, even if it’s at himself. “Captain oblivious!”

“Who doesn’t learn their friend’s boyfriend’s name!” Mark asks, grasping at straws.

“Who doesn’t realize his friends are dating!” Jaemin shoots back. Which, touché.

“Me! Captain oblivious I guess!”

Jaemin laughs again, and Mark swears his laugh is the prettiest when he’s laughing at Mark’s expense. Which, upon further consideration, might be a little sad, but Mark doesn’t care. Mark doesn’t care; he just wants to hear Jaemin laugh like that, loudly and ugly and hiccuping, the kind where his throat moves like that and he can’t quite close his mouth, he wants to hear him laugh like that more than anything. God, he’s whipped.

“So no, Renjun and Donghyuck aren’t dating, I think Renjun is just spending the break with Hyuck’s family,” Jaemin says, bringing Mark back to the original question, that conversation that felt far away comes into focus. Jaemin. The holidays. Jaemin.

“So what are you going to do now? What's your plan?” Mark can feel himself leaning in, doing the thing that he does where he leans in and gets too intense but he can’t stop himself.

Jaemin shrugs, “I don’t really know? I guess I’ll email housing and see if I can stay on campus?” Jaemin alone on campus for two weeks, their school isn’t like some colleges. They don’t have a month off or an internship term but still. Two weeks alone on campus.

“Come with me.”

“What? Really?” Jaemin asks and Mark realizes what he said, and in that same moment he realizes how true it is.

“Come with me and my moms. You’re my eomma’s favorite! You know you are always welcome in our house, you always have a space with me.” It almost shocks Mark how much he means it. Jaemin is quiet for a moment, just looking at Mark. Mark wills himself to blush, even though he _knows_ that’s not how this works.

“Do you think your moms would be okay with that?” Mark wants to respond immediately, to scream ‘of course!’ because he knows his moms, but he doesn’t think that would be very reassuring.

“I really do, but I can call them right now and make sure if you want?” Jaemin nods and as Mark takes out his phone he sees Jaemin close his notebook. Oh yeah, they were supposed to be doing school work. Mark presses the button to ring his eomma.

“Is that my darling boy, Mark Lee the traitor himself calling me?” Jaemin giggles, because Mark’s eomma is just loud enough to be heard even without speakerphone, her voice is sharp enough to cut through the air.

“Hi Eomma, nice to talk to you too.” Mark’s eomma cackles through the phone and Mark can feel a smile tugging at his lips.

“What's up honey, to what do I owe the pleasure of your call?”

“Is Mom there too?” Mark asks instead.

“Did you call me just to talk to your mom because if so I’m gonna be hurt, Mark!” his eomma teases.

“No! I just wanted to talk to both of you and you are better than Mom about picking up the phone!”

His eomma cackles again, Jaemin is laughing with her on the bed, in the background he can hear his mom's voice, “I resent that.”

A click and then, “Okay honey you’re on speaker, what’s up?”

“Can Jaemin join us for break this year? His current plan is to just stay on campus-” Mark’s eomma gasps predictably, bleeding heart, “and since we are getting a cabin anyway I figured-”

Mark’s mom cuts him off, “Honey is Jaemin there?”

Mark nods and then realizes his moms can’t see him, “Yeah he’s here.”

“Put us on speaker,” his mom says, and there's no room for arguments and so he does.

“Okay he can hear you.” Jaemin’s eyes have gone wide and he’s looking at Mark like he’s crazy. What did he expect? Him to lie to his moms? Mark would never.

“Hi Jaemin, sweetie.” Mark’s mom says.

“Hi Auntie Yoonah. Hi Auntie Hyo.” Mark and Jaemin aren’t related at all, god that would be a mess, but Jaemin has always called Mark’s moms auntie. It made Mark happy, a little bit of their shared culture, in return he called Jaemin’s mom auntie, even though Mark hasn’t talked to her in years.

Mark has a complicated relationship with Jaemin’s mom, not anywhere as complicated as Mark knew Jaemin’s own relationship with his mom was but complicated still. She had always loved Mark and been so nice to him, she wasn’t weird around his moms and had always let Mark in her home, giving him chores to do as Jaemin did his, making him feel a part of the family when he hung out there when his moms were busy at work. He made him feel like he belonged. But somehow, she stopped making Jaemin feel like he belonged, and that broke Mark’s heart. Because Jaemin didn’t _change,_ she wasn’t losing anything, he wasn’t- It’s not Mark’s place, it’s really not, Mark knows Jaemin is working through it with them, doing what they need. But god how could they not see everything Jaemin still Is? How much more he is? God, Mark is so bad at this.

“Of course you are welcome with us Jaemin,” It’s Mark’s Mom who speaks, “You’ll always have a spot at our table honey, we would love if you joined us for the holidays.”

A moment and then Jaemin speaks, “Are you sure? I don’t want to impose and I mean I could pay for my own food and stuff and the-” Mark’s eomma cuts him off, always the most brazen.

“Don’t worry about that, we’ll be cooking a ton, and we stocked up at Costco,” Jaemin smiles at Mark at that, he never realized they are such a Costco family, “and we have already paid for the cabin. Come with us Jaemin.” She says it and Mark wonders if Jaemin can imagine her smile as she says it the way he can, he thinks Jaemin can based on the way his own slides across his face, based on the way his eyes glint when he looks at Mark.

Jaemin’s eyes don’t leave Mark’s when he says, “I guess I don’t really have a choice then?”

“You don’t!” Mark says, at the same time as his Mom says, “You always have a choice sweetie!”

Mark’s eomma and Jaemin laugh at them. Jaemin gets out, with barely any breath, all of it spent on laughter, “I’ll come, I’ll come I can’t wait.”

And that’s that. And Mark can’t stop beaming.

[The Kinks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kinks) \- Critical Success

Mark has memories of Christmas spent at his grandfathers, his eomma’s dads house when he was little. It was a ranch style, Mark remembers, with sloping popcorn ceilings that almost kissed the top of Mark’s grandpa’s head when he stood straight. But standing straight was harder and harder as Mark knew him, he slanted down and hunched and curved in on himself and as he did that he curved away from them.

Mark remembers being lifted by large wrinkled hands to touch the ceiling. It felt like touching the sky. Something happened Mark doesn’t know what exactly but something happened, his Grandpa gave up. He stopped trying and Mark isn’t sure if he’ll see him again. He knows that if he does it won't feel like he’s touching the sky anymore.

They don’t go to his grandfather’s anymore. Now they stay home, or more frequently they find somewhere to go. They find somewhere that’s far enough away from anyone they know so it’s just them, no other options but them three until they go crazy from each other. They stay a little longer after the point that makes them stir crazy, because after stir crazy they always come back together again. It’s a reminder to each of them Mark supposes, but to him it’s always been a reminder that this family is his and he is loved and that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.

Jaemin doesn’t bring as much as Mark expects but he still brings more than Mark. Mark has his trusty Jansport filled to the brim, pajamas he will practically live in and real clothes and the few Christmas gifts he’s already secured (the rest will be meeting them at the cabin thanks to the postal service) as well as lots of socks, his thickest ones to wear in the morning when the floors will be unbearably cold. Jaemin has his school bag not quite threatening to burst the same way Mark’s is, and a small gym bag in his hand that Mark knows he’s had forever. They pile their bags in a small heap in the backseat, Jaemin has filled the center console with snacks from Costco, and the collaborative playlist they made for the trip is playing through the speakers, all that's left is for Mark to drive, so he does.

They are going to meet Mark’s moms at the cabin. It’s not quite in the middle of them, it’s a farther drive for Jaemin and Mark than Mark’s moms but it would be even farther if they had to drive to Mark’s home first. It’ll be about five hours and some change, and Mark intends to let Jaemin drive as little of it as he can get away with, not because he thinks Jaemin is some bad driver or that Mark is some chauvinist pig, but well Mark can get a little anxious when he’s not the one driving, and more importantly, Mark just likes driving. He likes it, and Jaemin hates it so of course it makes sense for Mark to drive even though Jaemin will, out of some sense of duty and fairness, take a white-knuckled, steely-eyed, clenched-jaw, turn behind the wheel of Mark’s Honda Civic.

Mark drives because it’s fun, well not really _fun_ but it's _good_. It’s good because driving, especially like this, on flat open roads, two lane interstates stretching across farmlands and small towns, speed limits hovering around seventy and up, is calm and repetitive. There aren’t two many cars on the road, and the majority of the ones that are on the road are like Mark and Jaemin, far from their stopping point, passing through. Sometimes Mark thinks he can recognize the locals, the cars that take turns fast and confident, that weave at just the right point, cars not packed with stuff in the back and instead with groceries. He always wondered what it would be like to live in a place like this, where almost everyone is just passing through, stopping for gas and a restroom and maybe to spend the night in a motel. Would it be lonely? Would it be anything but?

Maybe his next book can take place there, or here, in a town just like this where Mark and Jaemin have peeled off the road for Mark to get gas and Jaemin to buy energy drinks, Arizona tea and snacks. His character could be the tired looking girl behind the cash register he sees through the glass door while waiting for his tank to fill, the one who doesn’t really smile but doesn’t seem mean, just bored, just fed up. Maybe she’s sick of this town, Mark’s brain is already spinning a story without his permission: the protagonist being raised with an aunt and her mother when her dad skipped out on them and misguided dreams of chasing him down and escaping a small town. Maybe someday he should analyze why all his stories seem to be about finding someone but he’s too busy imagining a girl that comes off rude and all wrong when the illusion shatters. Jaemin steps up to pay and after a few moments a smile stretches across her face and she’s laughing with Jaemin about something. Scene bangs flop away to reveal smiling crescent eyes responding to everything Jaemin says next.

Jaemin is just too powerful. He is more than magnetic.

The pump clicks to a stop and Mark shocks out of his embarrassing staring. Can he even pretend it's embarrassing at this point if he’s always doing it? Mark puts the pump back and fastens the gas cap back in place. He starts the car up again and shivers as he waits for the heat to start back up again, something about standing outside didn’t make the chill hit as hard as when he’s sitting in his heatless car staring at his own breath. He might have some sort of insulation problem based on how fast his car loses heat but he doesn’t even know how to begin to go about getting that fixed. The… dealer? The…. mechanic? Maybe he’ll just ask his eomma, she knows a little bit about almost everything.

Mark startles at a knock on the door. It’s Jaemin, knocking with his elbow because his arms are too full of snacks to open it. Mark stretches across the console to open the door and Jaemin heaves himself in. His hair is a little tousled from the wind and his cheeks and the tip of his nose is flushed from the cold. He’s beaming.

"The people here are so nice!" Mark wonders if anyone else who came out of the gas station in the last half hour would say that. "How much longer do we have?"

Mark checks the GPS app on his phone, "It says three and a half hours but we might have to stop again before that."

"You know," Jaemin begins thoughtfully, "that could be a lot worse." Mark laughs too, he feels an odd sort of kinship with the girl in the gas station, two people weak to Jaemin.

Mark looks down at Jaemin's hands clutching his bag of spoils. "You get anything good?" Jaemin buckles and Mark finally pulls forward, allowing a frankly intimidating RAV4 to pull forward into the spot Mark's car had been occupying. He never really thought a Toyota could be intimidating before now.

"Oh, you are about to see the extent of my genius Mark Lee." Mark laughs but doesn't look at Jaemin yet, focusing on merging back onto the interstate, on the road around him. He hears the pop of a can and the staticky tear of a bag being torn open that only fuels his curiosity. When he finally gets situated in the left lane and can look over he's confronted with a straw poking his cheek.

"What?" Mark asks, flicking his eyes back to the road like a safe driver.

"So you can drink but keep both hands on the road!" Mark looks back, and yes Jaemin did in fact buy a pack of plastic straws just to stick one in an Arizona and hold it out for Mark. "Now drink, my arms are getting tired."

Mark laughs and dutifully drinks the too-sweet tea. Arizona's used to be really good. When Mark and Jaemin were in their freshman year, Arizona's tasted like sneaking out and taking an unapproved off-campus lunch, like walking the mile to the CVS or the Buckies and getting shitty sandwiches and chips, and, of course, Arizonas. Now they are too sweet and make something in Mark's jaw twinge, something that reminds him that this time next year he'll be twenty-one and going into his final year of college, and he's an adult now. Which maybe is him thinking too much about cheap shitty tea, but he's Mark Lee, he's an over-thinker. Plus it's not like he would ever waste anyone's time by saying it out loud.

The roads get smaller, and then they get slightly less well kept, more cracks in asphalt and pits to swerve around, and then they get more mountainous. The mountains make Jaemin's ears pop, something Jaemin won't let Mark forget and Mark worries about it from the driver's seat. He reaches out a hand to rub comfortingly at Jaemin's thigh before he realizes how weird that is and freaks out for a solid thirty seconds about an escape plan for his hand without making everything even weirder. The road curves and Mark's escape route comes in the form of a hand over hand turn. Success. Also, Jaemin doesn't seem to have noticed Mark's dilemma, too busy complaining about his ears still, so, double success. Well, sorta. Mark supposes Jaemin's ears still do hurt.

They arrive six minutes before their initial project arrival time, something Jaemin is very boastful about for someone who ended up not driving at all. Mark is helpless but to celebrate their victory over the machines together. Because that's what everything feels like when Mark is with Jaemin, a victory. Over everything, over life itself, over every single insecurity and fear plaguing Mark's mind.

Good lord Mark's heart needs to shut up. That was sappy.

Mark's moms got to the cabin first, and when he walks in there's already stuff strewn about to prove it, but they must have gone to get something because while their stuff is around, they aren't. The cabin is cute, it's like the one they rented three winters ago, which upon the smallest amount of reflection is not something he should say aloud because it absolutely reeks of privilege even in his own head.

Jaemin's reaction is the best part, the cabin is a cabin, it's cute and has a fun ceiling and some cool architectural choices here and there, but Jaemin's reaction to each element is ten times more interesting. Mark knows Jaemin went on vacations with his family, but it was usually to a hotel or to a resort or to visit family, it's exciting to see some of the magic of a cabin on Jaemin's face. He's delighted by the ladder leading to the loft space, he's ecstatic to run around and look at the bedrooms and he's left positively speechless by the view of snow capped trees from the small balcony off of Mark's mom's room.

He's even excited to try the well water, "Holy shit it totally does taste like blood! Mark! Mark! Have you tried this shit?" Mark has had well water before but he's willing to try it again with 'fresh eyes' as Mark says.

"This is like sparkling water for vampires," is all Mark can add, but even that seems to delight Jaemin. It's so much easier to be happier when Jaemin is happier, Mark didn't even think Jaemin was necessarily upset or super down at school, but seeing him even happier made something else unlock in Mark. Mark lets himself be chased by Jaemin, outside into the small front grass before it bleeds into trees, and be tackled into the snow in his jeans. They will stick to him, damp and cold, and spread a chill that will feel like it penetrates down to the bone but it's worth it. It's worth it to wrestle with Jaemin in the snow, tossing and turning in the powder like they are still the same kids they used to be, because in some ways, in the ways that matter, they are.

Being at the cabin is a little bit like stepping back in time. Even if Mark has never been to this cabin before, or has never gone on vacation with Jaemin, it's like a picture of time from a parallel universe or something. Separated from school and all their friends, being with Jaemin is both similar to and completely different from high school.

It's similar because when it's just them, and not even a hint of anyone else, it's like the weekends spent in Jaemin's basement but _more_ , more intense, for longer time, and confined to a limited space without the threat of a mom calling one of them home. It's like the weekends in Jaemin's basement bass boosted.

But it’s also completely different, it's completely different because when Jaemin laughs with his moms at the dinner table and joins Mark's mom in teasing him for being useless in the kitchen and Mark wakes up late to find Jaemin and his eomma silently working on a puzzle together on the living room floor, it's different. It's not just the same relief of his parents getting along with his friend, it's not even the warmth of seeing the people he cares about the most so clearly fit together, it's something new and fragile. It's hope blossoming in his gut, in his internal organs, in the tissue that connects all the fibers of his body together. It's a fragile precious hopeful thing. It's a tiny voice whispering, "what if the future could look like this too." And even though it might be embarrassing, and even if it might be foolish, and even if it might only hurt him, Mark doesn't crush it, and Mark doesn't suppress it.

Instead he holds onto it, the way he does when he has the perfect bite of food in an incredible meal, he savors it on his tongue, knowing it's a sensation to catalog so he can remember it and treasure it later. So he can look back and reflect on this moment, this is what it is like to be in love with Jaemin. Someday something might change, but right now, in this little cabin in the big woods with Mark's moms and this amazing boy, Mark savors it. Hope.

His moms too. His moms are a whole other thing, but seeing them here, like this, on vacation apart from the rest of the world and their jobs and their families, it's nice. Mark is reminded of his eomma's favorite band when he was little, "The Kinks" classically British wavering voices ringing out from the record player in the living room as she would hold his tiny hands and dance with his feet on top of hers. She would dance like that all over the living room, only trading him out to dance with Mark's mom instead.

He can picture them like that now, dancing around and laughing. Mark's eomma actually has rhythm and even used to be a dancer, but when they dance to The Kinks in the living room it's not about rhythm or making sense or the elegant body lines or even the beat really, it's just about that moment and joy.

"Waterloo Sunset" is maybe the most popular song by the Kinks. It, like almost everything, depends on who you ask. It's not Mark's eomma's favorite song by them, and it isn't the most played one and it isn't the cult darling of the queer community "Lola" but it's maybe the most beautiful songs of theirs and one of the most widely loved. Because, after all, the feeling of being outside a relationship looking in, watching two people who love each other so completely is something almost everyone can relate to.

Mark has a different last name than both of his moms. He has few memories before he met them, running in a park, someone smearing sunscreen on his face, the first time he was fed watermelon, but the point is there was a time before them. He came to his mother before his fifth birthday, and they honored that by keeping his very own last name, the same way they kept each of their own last names when they got married. His eomma is still Kim Hyoyeon, and his mom is still Im Yoonah, and he is still Mark Lee.

His mom had explained it to him like this: "We aren't bound by blood, we aren't tied together by duty. We are each our own person. The reason we stay together is because we choose to. We stay together because of love." It's beautiful. It was a hassle when they would go through airport security, but most of the best things in life are. Mark knows that his moms love him and each other and the same last name wouldn't make that more true, but still Mark has always related a little to "Waterloo Sunset." Mark doesn't have any siblings, and his moms are so in love and sometimes like the narrator of the song, he looks at them and all at once inside himself, he feels both comforted by their love and lonely.

He feels like that now, watching his eomma pull his mom around the balcony in a lazy circle of a slow dance to a song Mark can't hear from inside. He's paused at the window to watch them.They are older now, more wrinkled and his mom's hair has streaks of grey, but they are still so in love. And Mark can't help but be enraptured with the way they are enraptured with each other. He's so consumed by the image playing out before him he doesn't realize Jaemin coming up behind him until he speaks, a half step behind Mark and to the right.

"They are so cute." Quietly, he speaks quietly like he might spook them with his voice.

Mark answers in turn,"Sometimes I look at them and wonder how they ever were apart."

"They are just.." Jaemin doesn't finish but Mark knows what he means. Soulmates, split aparts, made for another, what love looks like, cheesy, corny, it all applies. It's all so true.

"Sometimes it makes me feel lonely, how in love they are," Mark says in a rare moment of conceded vulnerability. Maybe it's because he's looking forward at his moms' slow dancing forms and not at Jaemin's face. Jaemin's hand finds Mark's and squeezes it before shifting mostly away letting their pinkies linger together.

“I can see how that could be possible.” Mark takes a breath and Jaemin mirrors it. Jaemin takes that half step forward so he’s right next to Mark, but Mark still doesn’t look at him. Which is kind of funny because sometimes Mark feels like looking at Jaemin is his thing. “They love you so much.”

“Yeah,” Mark agrees easily, and he thinks that maybe this is insensitive, to have a conversation about parental love when Jaemin has his own complicated relationship with his parents right now. But Mark also knows it’s different, and that Jaemin won’t judge him for it.

“But also sometimes it can feel lonely. Especially when you don’t always feel needed.”

Like always, Jaemin has cut to the truth of the matter, Mark knows that they were this in love before him and they are without him. “Isn’t that, like, kind of fucked up though? It’s not rational.” Finally Mark looks at Jaemin, at his symmetrical face and chapped lips and perfect round eyes.

“Fuck being rational. It’s human, Mark. Of course you want to feel needed, we all want to feel needed, but sometimes,” Jaemin’s breath hitches just a bit, when Mark’s hand finds his for real, grabbing on for more than just a squeeze before Jaemin continues, “sometimes you have to settle for being wanted. And you are wanted, Mark.”

“You’re wanted too Jaemin,” Mark insists, immediately. Too fast and too earnest like he often is.

Jaemin closes his eyes and a serene smile stretches across his face, “am I?” It almost feels like a rhetorical question, but Mark is bad at those anyway. Mark turns back to watching his moms, the song must have changed, it's more upbeat dancing now, still just as loving but more twirling and spinning than just swaying.

“You are,” Mark answers, maybe minutes later. Jaemin just hums, and for a second Mark can pretend that maybe they will slow dance too. But they don’t.

Christmas is a warm affair, and not just because Mark's mom finally figures out how to make the electric fireplace work. There are gifts, not as many as when Mark was little, but enough to surround the small tree that came with the rented cabin. They laugh at it.It’s small and fake, which is only funny because their surroundings practically look like a Christmas tree farm, but it does the trick.

Mark has a few gifts for everyone, it’s one of his first Christmases where he has actual money from his on-campus job so he was excited to put it into gifts. He tried to make them extra special to make up for missing Christmas last year. He got a specially knit scarf he found in a small mountain town for his mom and a pair of hand made earrings for his eomma that she puts on immediately. Jaemin proved difficult, but he found a small little rug that was woven and surprisingly soft, well actually Mina found it in the market to get one for her mom but Mark thought it would be perfect for Jaemin to put in his room. They all like them.

Mark gets sweaters and a new model of phone he complains about having to learn how to use from his moms. They even surprise Jaemin by giving him a hat, a big knit beanie, the kind that would look dumb on Mark’s big head but looks nice on Jaemin and he thanks them profusely for it. Jaemin gives Mark’s moms a fancy vase he commissioned Jeno to make since he’s in the ceramics program and they all take turns looking at it and holding it and complimenting it.

Finally it’s time for Mark’s second gift for his moms, his real gift in a way, even though he prefaces it by saying “It isn’t really a present it’s just, well, here.” Mark holds his breath as they unwrap it: his book, printed and put in binders for them to read for the very first time, and with a shiny new dedication.

_For my moms, for showing me what real love looks like, and the lengths to which people go for it._

Mark’s eomma cries and Mark’s mom holds him tight, like she is tying him to her, like she can meld them together in her thanks. Jaemin has already read the book, but Mark hands him a copy too (when Mark’s mom lets him go enough to do so), where Jaemin’s name is thanked on the first page of the acknowledgements. And there, on the cover, in a blue sticky note is the real present to Jaemin.

_I finally listened to your advice, copies were sent out to different publishers with endorsements from one of the authors at the program. Thank you for making this possible._

And then again, on a different sticky note on the first page.

_Thank you, for everything, for more than I can say._

Jaemin tackles Mark in a hug just as tight as his Mom’s, and Jaemin gives Mark his gift. It’s twofold. First, there's a planner, with a bright happy print on the front for the new year, but when he opens it each week has a different handwritten encouragement from Jaemin to cheer him on through the year. The second is a special print edition of one of Mark’s favorite books, filled with post-it note comments of Jaemin’s thoughts on each part, a book he’s read just for Mark. Mark can’t hold back tears. All-in-all it’s a very emotional Christmas. It’s one of Mark’s favorite Christmases he can remember.

The rest of the day is spent like the other days, Mark and Jaemin go for a walk in the woods, they watch a movie on Jaemin’s computer, they eat dinner together and all drink wine and no one comments on the fact that Mark and Jaemin are still underage. Mark had thought that he and Jaemin would sneak into the woods together more to smoke, but they hadn’t. They just didn’t feel the need, not really, they would rather spend their evenings redownloading their old LAN games from Steam, or watching a movie, or playing some old board game that came in the cabin.

There _is_ a jacuzzi, so they spend some time in there but it’s not exactly the erotic wet dream Mark imagines it to be. It’s outside and while the water is hot, the air is _freezing_ and Mark can’t stand to have more than his chin and head exposed to the air, plus when Jaemin gets his binder wet he has to handwash it afterward and it’s a whole thing. They leave the jacuzzi mostly to Mark’s moms and instead spend their time inside or walking around the woods in the too-big snow boots that came with the cabin.

Their walks usually end up like this: Jaemin pausing to point at a large rock, or up a frozen waterfall, or most commonly at a giant pine. “I could climb this, like I totally could.”

“I’m sure you could but please don’t. It’s icy and you will definitely slip.”

“If Donghyuck was here he would try and race me instead,” Jaemin says through a pout.

Mark shrugs, “I’m just not interested in a pissing contest, especially one that could get one of us killed.” Jaemin pouts more, but it’s not very effective because he can’t fully commit to it, can’t stop smiling with his eyes to really pull it off.

The days before New Years Eve blend into each other, they pass both fast and slow. Mark wants to be romantic and say he’s not bored for a moment with Jaemin, but that’s not true. He spends afternoons chasing after his motivation and interest, but even those moments are better spent with Jaemin.

The bathroom near Mark and Jaemin’s rooms is effectively a lot of smaller rooms, weirdly the toilet is sequestered off into a tiny room and the shower in a different tiny room, and both open up to the sinks and mirror. It’s weird in the type of way that might feel impractical if Mark lived there, but can be called charming in a place he is staying in for just two weeks.

Well, maybe not completely impractical, because at times like this, when one person is showering, someone else can still use the rest of the bathroom. Mark comes out of the shower on new year's eve to Jaemin standing in front of the mirror with a damp face holding a razor.

“What are you doing?”

Jaemin glares at Mark in the mirror, “What does it look like I'm doing?”

“Asking to cut yourself, seriously did no one teach how to shave properly?”

Jaemin shoots Mark a look that says duh, but when he speaks it’s less icy and more open, “Obviously not.” Oh, _oh_ , of course no one taught him Mark, you absolute fucking buffoon. Mark immediately fastens his towel around his waist, and is grateful for the steam coming from the shower closet so the room isn’t too cold on his bare torso as he moves forward.

“Well, it’s not too late to learn.” Jaemin, for his part, looks surprised but not unhappy which Mark takes as a good sign as he gets things ready. He makes Jaemin wet his face, really wet his face, not just vaguely damp, and lather up using Mark’s own shaving cream until Jaemin has a face obscured by snow white mousse, while Mark plugs the sink and fills it with warm water. Mark steps forward, in between Jaemin and the counter with his back to the mirror and sink, holding the razor gently before he instructs Jaemin, “Watch what I do in the mirror, I’ll try to explain but I’m not always good with words.”

“Really, you don’t say?” Jaemin says, with smiling eyes.

“Quit being facetious when I have a blade.” Jaemin mimes zipping his mouth shut and Mark starts to work. It’s weird to be explaining it and weirder to be shaving a face that isn’t his but he starts where he always does, on the left side where sideburns would grow if Jaemin had more facial hair. A few strokes over the same area before moving on, making his way down to Jaemin’s jaw before moving a half step right and starting at the top again, rinsing the razor out in the water in between new sections.

Mark’s voice is quiet when he speaks, he doesn’t have to be so loud when he’s this close, “I do shorter strokes, that way you’re less likely to cut yourself. Plus I think it just gets a closer shave.” Mark is starting to be able to see Jaemin’s skin under the shaving cream, emerging smooth and slightly pink from sensitivity. Jaemin’s skin is so soft, softer than Mark’s, it glides under Mark’s thumb when he races his thumb down Jaemin’s freshly shaven cheek to check for missed stubble.

When Mark turns to rinse the razor of shaving cream and hair Jaemin speaks up, “How did you learn anyway?”

“Well, I also didn’t have a dad to teach me,” Jaemin rolls his eyes because, duh, “my eomma helped me.”

“Wait really Auntie Hyo? How?” Jaemin asks, nearly causing Mark to knick his face.

“Oi! No talking!” Jaemin shuts up, and Mark successfully begins on the right side, saving the mustache and chin for when Jaemin is being more cooperative. “I think she asked my uncle Kibum, but she didn’t have him teach me, instead she wanted to do it,” Mark begins, thinking back.

Mark can’t help but smile thinking about it, his eomma standing him in front of the mirror after Mark’s fourteenth birthday, shaving cream already lathered on her face and a promise on her lips. That they would do this, every weekend, until they both emerged knick free and clean shaven. He tells Jaemin about it, about standing in front of the mirror in his moms ensuite with her every sunday morning after church, matching razors in hand, learning together, giving each other tricks and advice, his mom repeating what she learned dutifully but still accidentally cutting herself with clumsy hands. He tells Jaemin about the embarrassing cuts, and about his mom teasing them both and about how it took four weeks for them to get it right.

It makes Jaemin smile too, and Mark has never seen a smile scratch across his lips this close, and it’s a slow building smile, watching it is like watching a National Geographic time lapse, flowers blooming or the sun setting or even an animal decaying, a cosmic sort of beautiful. Mark has to pull back the razor so Jaemin can laugh, and more than once he catches Jaemin watching his face instead of the mirror, but Mark can’t bring himself to adequately reprimand him. The time comes for the mustache and Mark directs Jaemin to make the dumb ‘o’ face with the lips tucked to get all the hair and to poke his tongue into the corner to get the stubborn noticeable hair that grows there. They pause after the mustache and chin to laugh before Mark continues.

“Okay okay, so the uhh….under chin-”

“Neck?” Jaemin suggests.

“I mean it’s not really the neck its just the bit under your chin and jaw-”

“The jowls?” Jaemin offes and Mark laughs.

“Yes, the jowls, you gotta shave down, which I know feels counterintuitive a bit, but like you gotta.”

“Why?”

Mark makes Jaemin tilt his chin up so Mark can work while he explains, “You get irritation the other way and more cuts, also there's like important veins in your neck – it’s not worth the risk.” Mark finishes Jaemin’s face and watches him wash off the shaving cream and stray hairs stuck to his skin, revealing his face to be shiny and clean. Jaemin brings his face closer to the mirror and tilts his head left and right with his fingers feeling the skin the way they do in razor commercials.

“Fuck, this is better than I was doing,” Jaemin concedes and Mark laughs but Jaemin continues, “I have no idea if I’ll be able to replicate it.”

“Did I do a shitty job explaining? Was the mirror not helpful?”

“No, you did great,” Jaemin pauses before putting on a fake voice, like some sort of cougar or school girl, or a horrible confusing mix of the two, “I was just too distracted looking at your _broad strong back_.” Jaemin’s eyes go half-lidded in a parody of lust, one Mark _knows_ isn’t true because he’s seen Jaemin at parties, seen the way Jaemin looks when he’s turned on, that is fun and blushy and open mouthed and completely different from this. This is a joke. This is a joke that hurts.

“Oh, haha,” Mark says eloquently, “well you can ask me if you need more help again.” Jaemin looks confused, eyebrows raised, and Mark realizes he probably should have laughed at that, and so he does but it’s stilted and too late and really just makes everything worse. “I’m gonna get dressed, before we have to go to dinner.”

Mark’s internal monologue doesn’t sound so much like hope, in fact it sounds like one word over and over, ‘coward’.

Mark smooths down his one decent button down he brought in the mirror. It’s wrinkly, but honestly could be a lot worse. He takes a breath, wishes he could smooth out his brain a little, so he doesn’t ruin everything before it can be anything. He takes another breath and meets Jaemin and his moms by the door. His eomma is wearing her new earrings and a skirt with a pattern he wants to get lost in and his mom is wearing the red lipstick she must wear every New Year’s Eve. Jaemin is wearing a button up shirt that's in much better condition than Mark’s and sleek jeans that make him look feet taller than Mark instead of just inches. Mark smiles at him and he smiles back, and everything’s fine. Mostly.

Dinner is lovely but Mark is distracted, a new year is a new beginning and Mark is a chronic overthinker. When Mark’s eomma asks everyone at the table what they want in the new year, what their resolutions are, when it’s Mark’s turn he predictably goes completely blank. Which doesn’t mean he can’t think of anything, he can think of a million things he just doesn’t know how to say them, or how to say what matters, or what he should even say out loud. His mom smiles at him kindly, but it sort of feels like a failure for some reason.

Jaemin knocks his shoulder into Mark’s, “You wanna get your book out there right? Find someone to pick it up?”

Mark nods quickly, agreeing so the hot seat can turn to Mark’s mom, but Mark can’t help but think that he’s learning from an assumption. Again. Because Mark _does_ want that, he wants to say that he’s submitted a completed book to publishers before he graduated undergrad but he doesn’t _just_ want that. Mark wants more. Mark wants so much more. Mark wants to finally email his biological father back and say he’s not interested, and Mark wants to find a way of working out that doesn’t make him feel like shit, and Mark wants to see Mina and Somi figure it out, and Mark wants to take a theology course, and Mark wants to move into an off campus apartment and Mark wants Jaemin. Mark wants Jaemin so bad.

Jaemin assumed something about Mark, and was wrong, and now Mark has learned. Mark wants everything. He just doesn’t know how to get it.

They drive back the next day. Mark and Jaemin wake up blessedly hangover free and make coffee for Mark’s moms as they sit, headache-ridden and bleary eyed, slumped over the breakfast table. Being young does have its perks, even though Mark knows most of his friends were out at parties last night and probably did wake up hungover out of their mind. The roads are nearly empty, and the gas station they stop at is damn near deserted, devoid of all cars and only populated by a staff that not even Jaemin can make smile given how badly they don’t want to be there.

Jaemin plays podcasts the whole way back, filling the car with history and advice and general nonsense that makes Mark laugh, but Jaemin’s comments make Mark laugh more. They aren’t comedy gold, but his one-sided banter with the podcasters has Mark cackling, they are just so _Jaemin_ , poor imitations of their cadence when talking, mocking their tone and asking purposefully naive questions back to a performer that will never respond. Jaemin is talking to a brick wall and Mark is eating it up. Especially, because when Mark’s eyes are on the road, and the air is dominated by a show and Jaemin’s commentary there isn’t room for conversation, or what Mark knows right now would be a poor attempt at one on his part.

He feels antsy, because the journey back to school sort of feels like the journey to his own doom. Because, after this trip is over it won’t just be Mark and Jaemin in Mark’s little bubble of his loved ones in the woods, it won’t just be them and some board games in a cabin with little else to do. It’s the sort of ansty-ness that made him run away to the Swiss Alps, the feeling that once this trip is over, this little time of just them then _they_ are over, which is ridiculous. Ridiculous because they will still be best friends, and Mark _is_ looking forward to seeing the rest of their friends, and starting his spring courses and getting back into the swing of things. Ridiculous because it’s not like they were anything at the cabin, they were just them. Mark and Jaemin, best friends, they were all that they had ever been.

The podcast distracts him, Jaemin’s commentary distracts him, the snow that started drifting down as Mark drove distracts him. But still, it itches under his skin.

When Jaemin takes a turn behind the wheel Mark spends all of it watching Jaemin’s face, the way the brake lights of other cars paint it red, the way his eyes harden when the speed limit increases, or the way he sometimes holds his breath when he changes lanes. Mark stares, unabashedly, and soaks it in. For the forty-five minutes Jaemin drives before Mark takes over again.

[Blackwater Fire of 1937](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_Fire_of_1937) \- Firefighters trapped by firestorm

The walk back to Mark’s dorm has never felt so long, and it’s not because of the snow. He can’t stop thinking about Jaemin’s face: in the bathroom before New Years Eve, opening presents on Christmas day, giggling on Mark’s dorm bed, fresh from the shower that first night when Mark realized he wanted Jaemin to kiss him. Mark can’t stop thinking of Jaemin’s face, of the flash of something, something that looked a lot like disappointment when Mark unceremoniously said goodbye in the parking lot. The walk back to Mark’s dorm has never felt so long, but maybe that's because he was only meant to make it halfway, because that's as far as he gets. That’s as far as Mark Lee gets before he’s turning around and sprinting the other way, his Jansport thumping on his back, as he goes where he needs to go, surefooted on the slippery ground. Because Mark’s soul only moves in one direction.

The Blackwater Fire of 1937, was, until recent history, one of the most tragic fires in terms of firefighters lost ever known. Fifteen firefighters died, some while fighting the fire directly, others from burns sustained, and there were a lot of reasons for it. The fire-resistant material firefighters clothes are made of today didn’t exist and firefighters were equipped only with heavy wool and cotton garments and fire safety shelters hadn’t been constructed yet. On top of that, they had no effective way to predict wind patterns and were more easily trapped by the firestorm that hit them, and boy did it hit them. On scene accounts depict walls of fire trapping men in, of enormous spires of flame reaching up into the sky to knock on God’s door. One man, Paul Tyrell, used his body as a shield to keep fire from getting to his comrades, sacrificing his life. In another situation five men were trapped by walls of encroaching fire and aching smoke-filled dry heat with no choice but to try to run through the flames and hope there was clear air on the other side. Of the five men, only one survived.

Mark can’t go on like this, he can’t keep suffocating himself, his hopes and his joy settling for something that might end up ruining everything anyway. This is his moment: he needs to run into the fire and hope that he’ll make it to the other side.

Jaemin opens the door after two knocks, eyes wide and shocked, probably at the noise, but Mark doesn’t pause to ask questions or even try to express the words just out of his reach because he’s not any good with his words, Jaemin knows this, Mark’s moms know it, Mina knows it, the whole world knows Mark Lee isn’t cut out for saying what needs to be said, so he doesn’t.

Mark takes two steps forward and pulls Jaemin in with hands on his cheek and neck, and he kisses him, with everything, all the swirling everything inside of him, the tornados of everything, the firestorms of everything, everything that has been consuming him and eating him up inside and just screaming Jaemin Jaemin Jaemin over and over again.

And the amazing thing, the simply miraculous thing, is that Jaemin kisses him _back_. Jaemin is kissing Mark back with as much fire and wind and _everything_ that Mark is kissing him with. Jaemin’s hands are finding Mark’s on his face and neck and he’s not pushing them away but squeezing them, holding them tighter, holding them down like stakes in a tent. Holding them so that it stays in place, so that they can’t be blown away by the wind, so they can weather the storm, so Mark and Jaemin can weather this storm together.

They break apart to breathe, except Mark can’t breath because the barricade inside him is broken and the words can’t stop tumbling out.

“I’m not kissing you just to kiss you, to get in your pants or because I want to try something out, im past trying anything out I want this I want you, I’ve wanted you because my soul moves towards you and I was a coward and I _am_ a coward and I ran away but now I’m back and I can’t keep pretending this is going to go away or that this is impossible because I _love_ you, I’m in love with you, it’s like anything happens and I think about you, I can’t stop looking at you and I _know_ you’ve noticed, it’s because I can’t look away because you’re just so- you’re so - you’re so fucking captivating dude,” Mark winces. The dude might have ruined it, but he’s out of words and breath and he’s left panting, and for once Mark can’t look at Jaemin, he looks at his feet. He’s got mismatched socks.

The thing about not looking at someone, is that it’s harder to tell what they’re thinking, and it's even harder to tell what they are going to do next, which is why Mark manages to be surprised when Jaemin uses Mark’s hands as an anchor point to reel him in and crash their lips back together. Mark really should be focusing more on kissing Jaemin right now, proving that he is worth it, worth even a splinter of Jaemin’s love but he’s too busy being overwhelmed and happy and confused and Mark Lee to do more than feebly kiss Jaemin back. He whines when Jaemin’s hands let go of Mark’s but it's just for them to cup Mark’s own cheeks and wipe at his wet face. Mark hadn’t even realized he was crying, but it makes sense. It’s just so much.

“You’re crying,” Jaemin says, softly, softer than a whisper, the space between them now is so small it makes the inches that taunted Mark when he shaved Jaemin’s face look like a football field. Jaemin kisses Mark’s cheeks gently, one and then the other.

“I am,” Mark feels useless to do anything else but let everything play out. He’s played his cards, he’s given all his words even the bad ones and now he’s just gotta wait. It’s overwhelming, but it doesn’t feel so heavy.

“Silly boy,” Jaemin says, and kisses Mark’s lips, in something sweet and chaste, “how could I go so long without loving you?” Mark’s breath stops, and the tears build up in his eyes because all he can do is blink, that's all that's left. “You’re unavoidable. You hold a spot in my mind no one else can touch. You left for a year and that didn’t change, it couldn’t. Because Mark, you are you, and sometimes I thought I would watch the world burn waiting for you to love me. But your friendship was enough, I was okay just being your friend.”

“Have you moved on?” Mark asks, voice hurt, tears rolling down his face, sweaty and red from sprinting and the snow. It would be fair if Jaemin did. Jaemin’s eyes are soft and watery, but there are no tears in them.

“There's no moving on from something like that. It’s different, it’s not something I can put down or replace, it’s something I carry with me. And it isn’t something that hurts, it’s something that bolsters me up, because it’s you, and you have been the most sure thing in my life for a long time. And so I’ve known for a long time that loving you would be a sure thing too, something that would always comfort me, even if you never loved me back, I would have this.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve been, I am a coward-”

“Stop saying that.” Jaemin says, sure, and Mark wants to laugh, that Jaemin would think of Mark as a stable thing when Mark has never seen himself that way, and then he wants to cry, with gratitude that Jaemin sees him that way anyway.

“I’m an idiot.”

“What you are, is stubborn,” Jaemin kisses Mark again and Mark tries to chase his lips, “and my favorite person.” Mark is so enraptured with looking at him, radiant in this moment, he almost misses what he says next, whispered and tangled in insecurity, “I was scared you would come back and hate me,” the ‘what I’ve become’ goes unspoken between them.

“Never, I couldn't. I think I would like, self-destruct if I did, explode and get my bits everywhere,” Jaemin chuckles, wetly, “because I would stop being me if I did. It would break the Mark system.”

“Does not compute,” Jaemin says, in an impression of a robot voice that's too laden with emotion to be very good.

“Exactly,” and it’s Mark’s turn to brush Jaemin’s cheek, even if there aren’t quite any tears there, “I could never ever hate you.”

And they are kissing again, Mark can’t say who started it, there’s no clear indication of who leaned in first when the space between them is so miniscule, it’s just them separate and then together. Together. Mark _feels_ the together, he drags his hand down Jaemin’s cheek to wrap around his shoulders and bring them even closer, to let the venn diagram that makes that up them up bleed into one big circle, one big overlap.

Mark smites everything that kept them apart in that moment, the distance, and fears, and Mark’s own pea sized brain by eliminating the physical space between them in a move Jaemin reciprocates, pulling Mark in with a hand on his back. Except Jaemin doesn’t stop pulling Mark at that, he’s stepping back and back and pulling Mark with them until they run into Jaemin’s bed.

“Are you sure?” Mark asks and Jaemin pulls back to hoist himself up onto the bed, it’s lofted a little too high for Mark to comfortably sit on so he has to awkwardly hop to follow Jaemin.

“I want to be closer to you, I’ve wanted to be with you since I was in high school, I’m sure, do you want this?” And with that, the proverbial floodgates are opened and every cursed thought Mark has had about Jaemin and his chapped lips and firm arms and sold thighs and long long long neck is crashing over Mark in a giant wave that makes Mark wish he bothered to read more wikipedia pages about tsunamis. He can’t help but surge into Jaemin, into his soft open arms propped up against the pillows and grab onto one firm thigh and Jaemin’s soft perfect waist and kiss Jaemin with years of misguided, built-up, desperate careening want.

Jaemin gives it all back and more, it’s clear to Mark in every single way that Jaemin actually does know what he’s doing, and he does it well. Mark’s hands feel clumsy even to him but Jaemin’s are tantalizing, sneaking up the back of Mark’s shirt teasing his spine, reaching into his snow-damp hair and tugging lightly in a way that makes Mark gasp into an already breathy and wet kiss. He’s out of his depth, he’s drowning in Jaemin. Jaemin tugs at Mark’s back so he can rut his growing bulge against Jaemin’s hip and Mark’s brain short circuits and his anxieties swell and Mark has to pull back and sit up, has to embarrass himself more by opening his mouth.

“This is going to sound stupid and I’m probably going to find a way to fuck everything up.” Jaemin’s brows furrow.

“Did I… is everything okay?” Oh god, Mark is already ruining everything.

“No! Yes! I mean, everything’s fine I just- listen okay you are so good at this and I- I haven’t had sex since before I left for the program and I feel like I’m somehow going to fuck this up!”

Jaemin reaches out a hand to grab Mark’s, “Do you think I’m some sort of sex master?”

“Kinda!” Jaemin laughs, but not in a way that feels mean or demeaning, “Everyone wants to have sex with you!” Jaemin scoffs at that but Mark plows on, “no really! It’s like, god this sounds like slut shaming but I swear I don’t mean it like that but you have sex! And people clearly like it, and like you are just so fucking perfect and sexy and I look at you, and I have no clue how you are real and you know what to do and I am just.” Jaemin is looking at Mark looking kind and flattered and a little flustered. “And I’m just this dork, who really really really likes you and wants to make you feel good.”

Jaemin squeezes Mark’s hand and tugs on his arm, “then get down here and let me show you how to make me feel good.” And so Mark goes, and he lets go, he surrenders some of his anxieties to the assuredness in Jaemin’s voice, the _love_ in Jaemin’s voice, because he trusts Jaemin. That’s the thing isn’t it? That Mark trusts Jaemin, with his body, with his heart.

So Mark follows his lead, moves against Jaemin in little waves that ramp up everything between them, holds him tight on his thighs in a ways that Makes Jaemin giggle and squirm and Mark lavishes those lips in attention, biting and sucking and only moving on when Jaemin playfully accuses him of picking favorites and points to his own unattended neck. Mark laughs too, right into Jaemin’s perfect neck, it’s easier to know that he doesn’t feel so overwhelmingly heavy.

He pays Jaemin’s neck the attention that it is due, which is all of it, licking and sucking and occasionally biting when he can work up his nerves to, loving the feeling of Jaemin squirming and giggling underneath him equal parts deliciously affected and ticklish. Jaemin tugs on Mark’s shirt and Mark tugs it off, managing to feel only a little self conscious, it’s nothing Jaemin hasn’t seen before. The reverent way Jaemin spans his hand across Mark’s taut stomach and non-existent pecs says otherwise and only makes the tightness in Mark’s pants grow.

“How are you so perfect?” Jaemin asks, letting his fingers roam over Mark’s ribs that he always thought were too prominent.

“That’s my line” Mark says eyes locked on the image of Jaemin, fluffy hair fanned like a halo, big eyes soft and filled with light from the lamp on his desk. The sun set hours ago by Mark doesn’t need it to see Jaemin, to feel his warmth. “Can I?” Mark asks, hands hovering over the hem of Jaemin’s own shirt and Jaemin nods, sitting up enough to help Mark take it off him and slip it over his head. It reveals Jaemin, firm and soft, bony collar bones and solid muscled shoulders underneath smooth tan skin, dotted with hair. A teasing happy trail on his stomach leading to the waistband of his sweatpants, on his arms and disappearing into his underarms, and trails of chest hair disappearing into his binder. He is miles of tan skin interrupted by the binder, slightly too pale, and slightly too pink, cutting into his shoulders and gapping slightly around Jaemin’s ribs.

Mark puts his hands on Jaemin’s waist, its warm, so much warmer without the presence of cotton in the way and when Jaemin tugs Mark back down, it’s _better_ so much better without the shirts, now it’s warm flushed skin on warm flushed skin, rubbing together and gliding in some places as Jaemin licks into Mark’s mouth and grinds up against his hips in a friction that is so irresistible it’s almost enough to distract Mark. Almost. Because he’s thinking too much to stay hard. He pulls back, just enough to speak.

“Are you going to keep your binder on?”

Jaemin stiffens a little underneath Mark before relaxing, “I was planning on it?”

“I just- Okay- I, listen I don't wanna dictate what you do with your body, obviously, but uh, I _know_ it’s bad for you to wear it during exercise and I can’t make my brain un-know that, and I genuinely don’t think I’m gonna be able to get hard if I’m thinking about doing damage to your lungs the whole time.” Jaemin looks at Mark and laughs and Mark can’t help but laugh a little too, helpless.

“I don’t think I’m gonna be able to enjoy this if I take it off….” Jaemin says and Mark wishes he could kiss him and tell him it’s alright, and then he remembers he _can_ and so he does. He kisses him.

“I want you to enjoy it I- wait,” Mark reaches down off the bed and almost falls but Jaemin’s hands on his hips stead him and help him return to the bed victorious, “what if you wore my shirt? Then it would be baggy and but also it would uh, like smell like me?” Mark finishes unsure. “Does that help?”

Jaemin smiles and bites his lip, “we can try it, here, turn around.” Mark does, he stares out the still dark window as he does, at the streetlights on the quad below, he wonders if they should close the blinds but realizes he doesn’t care. Jaemin is on a high floor anyway, it should be fine. He’s so distracted he doesn't notice Jaemin finishing getting changed until he is looping his arms around Mark's neck and sending all his weight against him.

“Oof,” Mark sags under Jaemin’s weight and then pushes back and wrestles him around back to where they were before, with Mark on top of Jaemin. It’s there, hovering over him that Mark realizes Jaemin took off his pants when he put on Mark’s t-shirt, revealing long tan legs for Mark to gape at and squeeze, and soft heather grey hanes. Jaemin laughs and pulls Mark back down to get back to business. Business is code for making Mark’s heart beat too fast, and his brain melt.

It’s code for Mark moving against Jaemin, moving _with_ Jaemin until he can’t come up with more worries and irrational fears, until all that’s left is Jaemin. Jaemin underneath him, Jaemin pulling on Mark’s hair and biting the shell of his ear, Jaemin tweaking Mark’s nipples until Mark moans, Jaemin pushing Mark back to help wrangle him out of his jeans and boxers before pulling him right back in and wrapping his lithe legs around Mark’s waist.

Mark has been looking at Jaemin for years, finding his eyes pulled to Jaemin in every situation, in every scenario, but nothing compares to this, the sight of Jaemin underneath him as he makes Jaemin feel good. Mark kisses Jaemin’s neck and collarbones and uses his fingers to make him squirm and squeal and giggle more, laughing and breathless until that too devolves into moaning. Jaemin wraps his hand around Mark in turn, pulling him along with the rhythm established by Mark’s fingers, but he can’t keep going when Mark picks up the pace until Jaemin shivers and finishes with a long drawn out moan.

Jaemin is sitting up a moment later, opening his bedside table to show off a shiny new box of condoms, it makes Mark laugh, a laugh that turns into a sigh when Jaemin rolls one onto Mark. Jaemin’s face only gets more beautiful, more enrapturing, more alive when Mark pushes into him and Jaemin pulls him even closer even deeper with his legs around Mark’s waist.

Then Jaemin flips the script, turning them around so Jaemin is on top and Mark is helpless to do anything but hold tight to Jaemin’s hips and feel his powerful thighs as he makes something powerful swell and grow in Mark, like a bike pump in his stomach without the embolism, like a rubber band being pulled taut in his legs and a circuit being completed in his chest. Like something full of potential energy, growing and growing, and it’s going to explode and overwhelm him. This is the tide going out before the biggest wave, this is the lighting before the thunder, this is the ground rumbling before an avalanche.

It hits Mark and he is knocked flat, he is washed with pleasure, he is consumed, but he isn’t drowned. He is struck but not killed, he is blanketed not buried. It hits him in the moment afterward, with Jaemin in his arms kissing pretty hickies onto Mark’s chest, just how _alive_ he feels, and it’s all thanks to Jaemin.

“Thank you.” Jaemin makes a face and kisses Mark’s chest.

“Okay weirdo,” another kiss, inches below Mark’s collar bone.

“What? I am thankful!”

“I am too, but if you say it, it sounds like I just fucked you as a favor,” Mark frowns at the language and at the idea, and gathers Jaemin closer in his arms.

“What should I say then?”

“Say what you feel, as long as it’s not just thank you.”

“Thank you, Jaemin, for making me feel loved, and for making me feel alive.”

“Mark, you are so loved,” Jaemin’s eyes are sparkling as he shifts up on Mark’s chest to get closer, “and you are so _alive_.” He seals it with a kiss, and Mark believes him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last thank yous I swear: Thank you to the mods, to my amazing betas and to you for reading! 
> 
> [My NSFW Minors dni](https://twitter.com/translixie)  
> [Fic twit](https://twitter.com/ImpishHaechan)  
> [CC for yelling at me abt these dorks](https://curiouscat.me/translixie)

**Author's Note:**

> The Book Jaemin quotes from, and the one that inspired Jaemin's chapter and pretty much this whole fic is "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard, she writes a lot about the brutality of nature in fascinating ways.
> 
> You can find me here:  
> [My twitter (minors dni)](https://twitter.com/translixie)  
> [CC to talk about these goofy goofy boys](https://curiouscat.me/translixie)


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